The Resilience of Tropical Forest Invertebrates to Microclimate Change

Abstract

This dataset examines the thermal physiology of ants accross the SAFE project, with the goal of understanding how changing microclimates affect communities of invertebrates in disturbed landscapes. Tropical invertebrates are expected to already live close to their upper thermal tolerances, and so the rapid changes to microclimate brought about by logging may be a powerful determinant of the emergent communites in disturbed forests. The worksheet contains the upper critical temperature (CTmax) of individual ants identified to genus level. Ants were collected from the ground or soil layer unless specified as arboreal. CTmax was determined using a ramping procedure whereby temeprature was increased from 32 degrees upwards at a rate of 0.2 degrees per minuted until individuals lost motor control. Ants were found by searching opportunistically throughout entire blocks, therefore for locations we have simply inputted one large fractal order from each sampling block used.

This dataset examines the thermal physiology of ants accross the SAFE project, with the goal of understanding how changing microclimates affect communities of invertebrates in disturbed landscapes. Tropical invertebrates are expected to already live close to their upper thermal tolerances, and so the rapid changes to microclimate brought about by logging may be a powerful determinant of the emergent communites in disturbed forests. The worksheet contains the upper critical temperature (CTmax) of individual ants identified to genus level. Ants were collected from the ground or soil layer unless specified as arboreal. CTmax was determined using a ramping procedure whereby temeprature was increased from 32 degrees upwards at a rate of 0.2 degrees per minuted until individuals lost motor control. Ants were found by searching opportunistically throughout entire blocks, therefore for locations we have simply inputted one large fractal order from each sampling block used.