Ants give clues to ecosystem health

Ants and other invertebrates are helping our scientists evaluate the health of ecosystems in northern Australia.

Land managers are increasingly looking for reliable indicators of ecosystem health that can be used to assess the ecological sustainability of land management practices.

Invertebrate organisms, such as ants, termites and beetles, are ideal for this role because of their dominant contribution to biodiversity, their influence on important ecological processes, and their sensitivity to environmental change.

If an ecosystem's invertebrate populations are in good shape, then this indicates that the ecosystem in general is also in good shape. 

Australia’s ants on duty

In Australia, ants are the most widely used invertebrate indicators in land management. Ants are particularly abundant and diverse in Australia, with up to 20 million ants representing a hundred different species occurring in just one hectare.

The use of ants as bioindicators is founded on three decades of research by CSIRO and its collaborators on the dynamics of Australian ant communities, and particularly their responses to disturbance.

CSIRO research has played a key role in validating the effectiveness of ants as bioindicators, establishing protocols for their use, and promoting and implementing these protocols.

In northern Australia, ants are widely used by the mining industry to assess the extent to which mine sites have been successfully restored.

Ants are also used as indicators of off-site impacts of mining, and of the sustainability of fire and grazing management in savanna grasslands.

Current projects

• Responses of ants to variation in grazing intensity at Wambiana in North Queensland (in collaboration with Qld Department of Primary Industries)

• Responses of ants to variation in fire regimes in the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia (in collaboration with WA Department of Environment and Conservation)

• Ant communities in relation to fire history in the Great Western Woodlands of southwestern Western Australia

• Savanna ant distribution in relation to climate change (in collaboration with US Fulbright PhD scholar Israel Del Toro)

• Predicting responses of rainforest ants to climate change in Australia’s wet tropics (James Cook University PhD project)

• Impacts of buffel grass on ants in central Australia (Charles Darwin University Honours project).

 Learn more about research by Ecosystem Sciences.