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. 2024 Jul 5;15(1):5641.
doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-49918-2.

Global biogeographic regions for ants have complex relationships with those for plants and tetrapods

Runxi Wang  1 , Jamie M Kass  2   3 , Chhaya Chaudhary  4   5 , Evan P Economo  2 , Benoit Guénard  4
Affiliations

Global biogeographic regions for ants have complex relationships with those for plants and tetrapods

Runxi Wang et al. Nat Commun. .

Abstract

On a global scale, biodiversity is geographically structured into regions of biotic similarity. Delineating these regions has been mostly targeted for tetrapods and plants, but those for hyperdiverse groups such as insects are relatively unknown. Insects may have higher biogeographic congruence with plants than tetrapods due to their tight ecological and evolutionary links with the former, but it remains untested. Here, we develop a global regionalization for a major and widespread insect group, ants, based on the most comprehensive distributional and phylogenetic information to date, and examine its similarity to regionalizations for tetrapods and vascular plants. Our ant regionalization supports the newly proposed Madagascan and Sino-Japanese realms based on tetrapod delineations, and it recovers clusters observed in plants but not in tetrapods, such as the Holarctic and Indo-Pacific realms. Quantitative comparison suggests strong associations among different groups-plants showed a higher congruence with ants than with tetrapods. These results underscore the wide congruence of diverse distribution patterns across the tree of life and the similarities shared by insects and plants that are not captured by tetrapod groups. Our analysis highlights the importance of developing global biogeographic maps for insect groups to obtain a more comprehensive geographic picture of life on Earth.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. The global phylogenetic biogeographic classification for 267 ant genera shows 7 realms and 21 regions.
Ant biogeographic realms and regions of the world are shown in a, and the associated dendrogram resulting from hierarchical clustering based on phylogenetic turnover (Pβsim) across 5 × 104 km2 hexagons is shown in b. Ordination results using nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) show relationships among realms in c and regions in d. Black solid lines and white lines (dashed on the ocean) delineate the borders of realms and regions, respectively. Colors used to characterize particular realms in maps correspond to those in dendrogram and ordination plots. Areas without sufficient data or invalid biogeographic units are indicated in gray. The map in a is in the Robinson projection system, and the dendrogram in b used the unweighted pair-group method using arithmetic average (UPGMA).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2. The global phylogenetic biogeographic classification for 13,494 ant species shows 9 realms and 21 regions.
Ant biogeographic realms and regions of the world are shown in a, and the associated dendrogram resulting from hierarchical clustering based on phylogenetic turnover (Pβsim) across 5 × 104 km2 hexagons is shown in b. Ordination results using nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) show relationships among realms in c and regions in d. Two newly defined species-level realms and their affiliated regions are underlined. Black solid lines and white lines (dashed on the ocean) delineate the borders of realms and regions, respectively. Colors used to characterize particular realms in maps correspond to those in dendrogram and ordination plots. Areas without sufficient data or invalid biogeographic units are indicated in gray. The map in a is in the Robinson projection system, and the dendrogram in b used the unweighted pair-group method using arithmetic average (UPGMA).
Fig. 3
Fig. 3. Congruence in spatial association of global regionalizations among taxa at the species-level.
The V-measure (Vβ) is an area-weighted harmonic mean of homogeneity between two regionalization schemes, where higher values mean stronger spatial associations. Higher standardized effect size (SES) means that the similarity between the observed biogeographic structure of taxa on the row and column is higher than would be expected by random regionalizations of taxa on the column, with * indicating two-sided p value < 0.05. Comparisons based on the regionalization of ant genera show similar patterns, and details can be found in Supplementary Fig. 13.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4. The spatial congruence and divergence of global regionalizations between ant species and other taxa.
Colors indicate the homogeneity of biogeographic regions for ants (light to dark brown) in relation to schema for amphibians (a), birds (b), mammals (c), reptiles (d), and vascular plants (e) and the schema of these taxa (light to dark blue) in relation to the ant regionalization (f–j). Homogeneity is measured by 1 minus the normalized Shannon entropy. Comparisons based on the regionalization of ant genera can be found in Supplementary Fig. 13.
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References

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