Potential decline in the distribution and food provisioning services of the mopane worm (Gonimbrasia belina) in southern Africa

The mopane worm (Gonimbrasia belina) is an edible insect distributed across southern Africa. As a culturally important source of food, the mopane worm provides nutrition, livelihoods and improves wellbeing for rural communities across its range. However, this is strong evidence that insect populations are declining worldwide, and climate change is likely to cause many insect species to shift in their distributions. For these reasons, we aimed to model how the ecosystem service benefits of the mopane worm are likely to change in the coming decades. We modelled the distribution of the mopane worm under two contrasting climate change scenarios (RCPs 4.5 and 8.5). Moreover, given that the mopane worm shows strong interactions with other species, particularly trees, we incorporated biotic interactions in our models using a Bayesian network. Our models project significant contraction across the species’ range, with up to 70% decline in habitat by the 2080s. Botswana and Zimbabwe are predicted to be the most severely impacted countries, with almost all habitat in Botswana and Zimbabwe modelled to be lost by the 2080s. Decline of mopane worm habitat would likely have negative implications for the health of people in rural communities due to loss of an important source of protein as well as household income provided by their harvest. Biogeographic shifts therefore have potential to exacerbate food insecurity, socio-economic inequalities, and gender imbalance (women are the main harvesters), with cascading effects that most negatively impact poor rural communities dependent on natural resourc

Stability of Afromontane ant diversity decreases across an elevation gradient

© 2019 As the need to better understand the ecology of hotspots of endemism intensifies, the insurance hypothesis is drawing increasing attention from policy-makers and scenario-planners. The hypothesis states that biodiversity increases ecosystem stability. When species numbers fluctuate, there is potential for further perturbation, loss of function and increased opportunity for invasive species to fill vacated niches. Southern Africa is predicted to be disproportionately impacted by global change, and high altitude systems as foci of endemism are particularly vulnerable to warming. Using ants, a group key to ecosystem function, we assess effects of temperature, season, aspect, vegetation and soil conditions on montane ant species richness, stability of ant community composition, and stability of ant species richness across an altitude gradient. Over six consecutive years of bi-annual sampling, we gathered one of the largest standardized data sets to date. We showed for the first time that stability of ant species richness decreases with increasing altitude, whilst compositional similarity of ant communities is higher with increasing altitude. Findings reveal more similar, species-poor, less stable ant communities at high altitude at the same sites over time

A global database of ant species abundances

What forces structure ecological assemblages? A key limitation to general insights about assemblage structure is the availability of data that are collected at a small spatial grain (local assemblages) and a large spatial extent (global coverage). Here, we present published and unpublished data from 51 ,388 ant abundance and occurrence records of more than 2,693 species and 7,953 morphospecies from local assemblages collected at 4,212 locations around the world. Ants were selected because they are diverse and abundant globally, comprise a large fraction of animal biomass in most terrestrial communities, and are key contributors to a range of ecosystem functions. Data were collected between 1949 and 2014, and include, for each geo-referenced sampling site, both the identity of the ants collected and details of sampling design, habitat type, and degree of disturbance. The aim of compiling this data set was to provide comprehensive species abundance data in order to test relationships between assemblage structure and environmental and biogeographic factors. Data were collected using a variety of standardized methods, such as pitfall and Winkler traps, and will be valuable for studies investigating large-scale forces structuring local assemblages. Understanding such relationships is particularly critical under current rates of global change. We encourage authors holding additional data on systematically collected ant assemblages, especially those in dry and cold, and remote areas, to contact us and contribute their data to this growing data set