Pitfall trapping is expansively used and recognized as a good method to sample epigeic arthropods, including ants. This sampling method may attract species from different strata and can assess competition relationships between ants while being sensitive to exclusion, missed diet, and time of sampling. On the other hand, baiting traps use foods to attract ants, which can later be actively sampled. This sampling method provides good sampling effort for epigaeic fauna, yet it is sensitive to species size and level of activity. Pitfall traps are pits set in the ground that sample epigeic fauna that randomly falls inside it. They were selected in this study because they do not need arboreal stratum nor extensive litter depth to be used. Two common sampling methods for ant assemblages are pitfall and bait traps. Temperate open habitats on the other hand have not been reviewed as much and are linked to methodological limitations regarding what kind of traps can be set in them. As many other groups, ants are globally more diverse in the tropics than in temperate areas, and the amount of publications regarding sampling methods is also greater for tropical regions. Ants are known to be good bioindicators, with high ecological importance. Bait trapping can hardly be considered a complementary method to pitfall trapping for sampling ants in open temperate habitats, as it appears basically redundant with the latter sampling method, at least in coastal heathlands of the East-Atlantic coast.īecause of their high abundance and diversity except in polar regions, ants play a key role in ecosystem functioning in many terrestrial habitats, from open ecosystems like deserts to forests, and from the floor to the canopy. Taxonomic and functional diversities from pitfall assemblages increased from north to south locations, following a pattern frequently reported at larger spatial scales. Functional richness followed the same pattern, with consistent results for both community weighted mean (CWM) and Rao’s quadratic entropy. Both observed and estimated species richness were significantly higher in pitfalls compared to spatially pair-matched bait traps. Ants were collected and identified to species level, and six traits related to morphology, behavior (diet, dispersal and maximum foraging distance), and social life (colony size and dominance type) were attributed to all 23 species. In this study, taking advantage of a large-scale project of heathland restoration (three sites along the French Atlantic Coast forming a north-south gradient), we evaluated the relative efficiency of these two methods for assessing both taxonomic and functional diversities of ants. Whereas bait and pitfall trappings are two of the most commonly used techniques for sampling ant assemblages, they have not been properly compared in temperate open habitats. It therefore appears that in the particular context of open temperate habitats, using bait traps on top of pitfall traps will cost time without information gained and that pitfalls should thus be favored in this context. Pitfall traps captured more species and a wider set of functional traits than did bait traps, and all species caught by bait traps were also caught by pitfall traps. The comparison was performed using both a taxonomic (species count) and a functional (i.e., acknowledging of ecological characteristics of species to describe an assemblage of species) approach. This study aimed to assess the relative efficiency of two common sampling methods: pitfall and bait trapping. Only little work has been done in open temperate habitats. Depending on the habitats sampled, the effectiveness and complementarity of the sampling techniques may vary. This issue has been addressed by many authors devising multiple sampling techniques. ![]() Ants, due to their high ecological diversity, are challenging to properly sample.
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