O efeito da paisagem urbana nas assembleias de formigas arborícolas em áreas verdes de Manaus, Amazonas

Abstract

The urbanization process is the main cause of loss and natural habitat fragmentation, changing lots of ambiental variables. Therefore, in order to preserve the biodiversity and promote ambiental, social and psicologic functions to general population, green-urban areas are created. For being considered ecosystemical engineers, the ants have an important role in the energy flux of the ecosystem where they belong, Nonetheless, the ants are sensible animals who respond to ambiental alterations, there are many studies focusing in epigeic ants, but the ones focusing on urban arboeal ants are scants. Therewith, this research aims to analyze the effects of urban landscape on landscape scale (forest cover and fragments quantity) acting on ants species richness, and regional scale (distance between green-areas) acting on arboreal ants assemblage composition of green-urban areas from Manaus, Amazonas. For catching ants was used eight forest-fragments in urban areas and a 250 meters transect was drawn in each fragments, 20 pitfalls traps with 150 ml of human urine were fixed in trees, each 25 meters, about 2 meters from de ground. A 1000 meters scale was delimitated starting from the center of each green-area in order to analyze the landscape metrics, and geographic information systems were used to determine the use and land cover. The forestal cover proportion acted positively on the species richness, green-areas who had better forestal cover proportion had better species richness implying an available resouce increase.In contrast, the fragmentation has shown affect negatively the species richness, increasing the presence of generalist species who prejudice the permanancy of the most specialist species. On regional scale was not observed the influency of the distance between green-areas on arboreal ants assemblage composition, suggesting a coexistence process among the ants species found on the green-areas.