Green tree ants.
Ants give clues to ecosystem health
Ants and other invertebrates are helping our scientists evaluate the health of ecosystems in northern Australia.
- 8 June 2005 | Updated 14 October 2011
Invertebrate organisms, such as ants, termites and beetles, play a key role in ecosystem health because of their dominant contribution to biodiversity, and their influence on important ecological processes.
If an ecosystem's invertebrate populations are in good shape, then this indicates that the ecosystem in general is also in good shape.
Land managers are increasingly looking for reliable indicators of ecosystem health that can be used to assess the ecological sustainability of land management practices.
Australia’s ants on duty
In Australia, ants are the most widely used invertebrate indicators in land management.
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's Invertebrate Biodiversity and Bioindicators project 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.
More recently, ants have been used as indicators of off-site impacts of mining, and of the sustainability of fire and grazing management in savanna grasslands.
Up to 20 million ants representing a hundred different species can be found in just one hectare of Northern Territory savanna.
Latest research
Recent research has examined the extent to which responses of ants to land management measures reflect those of the ecosystem more generally.
We are also developing cost-effective protocols for using ants as indicators. Much of this work has been done through the Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre, particularly in collaboration with the Biodiversity Unit of the Northern Territory Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Environment.
Find out more about CSIRO's varied approaches to Environmental Monitoring & Analysis.
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Project Title: Invertebrate biodiversity and bioindicators
Location: northern Australia
Goal: establish the effectiveness of ants as bioindicators
Outcome: implementation of ant biodiversity and ecological monitoring systems
Principal Scientists: Dr Alan Andersen and Dr Ben Hoffmann
Partners:
- Tropical Savannas CRC
- Northern Territory Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Environment
- Environmental Research Institute of the Supervising Scientist (ERISS)
- NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation
