Ants accelerate succession from mountain grassland towards spruce forest

Abstrakt

We demostrated that the massive occurrence of Lasius flavus anthills contributes to a runaway feedback process that accelerates succession towards forest. The effect of ants as ecosystem engineers is scale-dependent: although they stabilize the system at the scale of an individual mound, they may destabilize the whole grassland system over a longer time scale if combined with changes in mowing regime.

Klíčová slova

• anthills
• chronosequence
• disturbance