Current Projects

It has been an endless debate in ecology whether competition play a key role in shaping communities within and among natural systems. Ant communities seem to be sensitive to competition in the way they evolved, and in how they assemble in an ecological time scale frame. Several study have shown that invasive ants have the competitive ability to disassemble native communities, and to alter species richness. Not enough study have however been performed, and not enough different systems have been explored to make general conclusion about how dominance relate to community structure and species richness. I will initiate in August 2005 an experiment at the Coweeta Long Term Research Station that will assess the importance of various abiotic and biotic factors in shaping litter-ant communities.

I am currently completing a database that inventories the geographic distribution of North American ants. Over the last 10 months I spent day and night in Dr Dunn’s lab searching the last hundred years of scientific literature. The end product should be quite interesting and will surely be extremely helpful in understanding patterns of ant diversity and community invasion, and the effect of global warming on population of the ants of north America. Visit the website at : http://www4.ncsu.edu/~rrdunn/AntMacroecology.html.

In March and April 2006 I assisted Dr Dinah Davidson in a research expedition in the Tropical Rainforest of Brunei, Borneo. We conducted a series of behavioral experiment aiming at understanding the processes involved in forming arboreal ant mosaics. Although currently I am not involve in any project concerning tropical ant mosaic, I am hoping to incorporate this topic in my PhD dissertation project.

My work is currently focusing on the ants of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, both in North Carolina and Tennessee. In the two last years we systematically sampled litter-ants over 20 different sites throughout the Smokies. Our study is in part a contribution to the ATBI Project, which aims at inventorying the diversity of life forms in the southern Appalachians. With the Sanders Lab, we are attempting to get a rough idea of what the ant communities in the Smokies look like almost 7 decades after A.C. Cole first did it. The questions I am interested in relate to the distribution of ant richness and abundance in the GSMNP, as well as the structure of local communities. We are using a mix of observational data and manipulative experiments in order to understand variation in litter-ant richness among and within sites.