PS 39-65 - Diversity and distribution of ants across elevation gradients and between habitat types of Souk Ahras forest (North East Algeria)

Abstract: Ants are among the most diverse, abundant and ecologically significant organisms on earth. They are distributed all over the world, and their colonies provide both a stable food resource and numerous niches for thousands of other organisms, termed myrmecophiles, they are considered an important ecosystem engineers. Gradients of species richness are ubiquitous. A key goal in ecology is to understand whether and how the many processes that generate these gradients act at different spatial scales. Here we evaluate hypotheses for diversity gradients with forest structure, we identified 35 species belonging to 3 different families over a period of one year at different levels of different altitudes. The richness and abundance of ant populations show geneally spatio-temporal variations due to many factors specific to each habitat.