Temperate Canopy Ants
While we typically think of ants as ground-dwelling creatures, arboreal ants dominate the canopies of tropical forests. Tropical canopy ants exhibit incredible taxonomic and ecological diversity, and they play critical roles to maintain ecosystem functioning. Despite this, we know almost nothing about canopy ants in temperate ecosystems, especially in North America.
My research seeks to catalogue patterns of diversity of temperate canopy ants across 4 major temperate North American ecoregions. To understand how temperate canopy ant communities are structured, I employ methods and hypotheses from nutritional and thermal ecology. I ask the following questions:
My goal is to increase our understanding of a vastly understudied group of organisms in order to contribute to a more complete picture of temperate canopy ecology and temperate forest ecosystems in a changing world. |