Fig 1.
Location of the study sites in central Veracruz, Mexico.
The red circles represent 200-m-buffers around each remnant of riparian vegetation where leaf-litter ants were sampled. Blue lines are the tributaries of the Antigua River watershed. In the inset are indicated the location, in Mexico, of the study area (red square), the state of Veracruz (black polygon), and the location of Mexico (white polygon) between North and Central America. This map was generated by the first author (MAGM) using ArcGIS 10.2® and vector data models available in the GIS website of the Mexican commission for the knowledge and use of biodiversity (CONABIO, http://www.conabio.gob.mx/informacion/gis/) under a CC BY license.
Table 1.
Land cover types determined from field verification and remotely-sensed data in the studied landscapes of Central Veracruz, Mexico.
Fig 2.
Landscape predictors included in the 95% confidence set of the models (gray bars) and in the ΔAICc < 2 set of the models (black bars) for explaining the abundance, species richness, Shannon, and Simpson diversity of leaf-litter ant assemblages associated with remnants of riparian vegetation in central Veracruz, Mexico.
The importance of each predictor is shown by the sum of Akaike weights (∑wi, panels in the left side). Panels on the right side indicate the values of the averaged model parameter estimates (β) ± unconditional variance of information-theory-based model selection and multi-model inference. The sign (±) of parameter estimates represents a positive or negative effect of the predictor on the diversity measures. The goodness-of-fit of each multiple model is indicated in each panel as the percentage of deviance explained by each multiple model. The predictors are the percentage of riparian land cover (RL) and tropical montane cloud forest land cover (FL) within the surrounding landscape, the shape (SI) and width (WR) of the focal riparian remnant.
Table 2.
Effects of the landscape characteristics on alpha and beta diversity of leaf-litter ants associated with remnants of riparian vegetation.
Relationships between landscape predictors and alpha diversity metrics and between landscape predictors and beta diversity metrics are indicated separately.
Fig 3.
Landscape predictors included in the 95% confidence set of the models (gray bars) and in the ΔAICc < 2 set of the models (black bars) for explaining the compositional similarity indicated by Jaccard, Sørensen, and Morisita-Horn indices of leaf-litter ant assemblages associated with remnants of riparian vegetation in central Veracruz, Mexico.
The importance of each predictor is shown by the sum of Akaike weights (∑wi, panels in the left side). Panels on the right side indicate the values of the averaged model parameter estimates (β) ± unconditional variance of information-theory-based model selection and multi-model inference. The sign (±) of parameter estimates represents a positive or negative effect of the predictor on the diversity measures. The goodness-of-fit of each multiple model is indicated in each panel as the percentage of total variation explained by each multiple model. The predictors are the percentage of riparian land cover (RL) and tropical montane cloud forest land cover (FL) within the surrounding landscape, the shape (SI) and width (WR) of the focal riparian remnant.