Habitat complexity or random chance: What affects the distribution of urban ants?

A vast array of research in ant community ecology has been focused on competitive relationships between ants and how the resulting dominance hierarchies shape ant distributions. However, recent work with using null models has brought the importance of such competitive hierarchies into question and has prompted investigations into the community-shaping forces of both stochastic and non-competitive deterministic processes such as resource availability and habitat structure. Investigations in community ecology are often conducted in relatively pristine ‘natural’ areas, but the importance of understanding community functioning in anthropogenically disturbed settings has become recently emphasized as well. This paper describes a survey of ant communities in urban and suburban yards with varying habitat complexity in the Knoxville, TN area. The relationship between ant community structure and habitat complexity will be discussed.