Southeast Asia’s tropical peat-swamp forests (TPSF) are
globally important for carbon storage and biodiversity conservation, but are at
risk from multiple threats and urgently require improved management. Ants are
often used as ecological indicators in monitoring programmes to guide adaptive
management, but data on TPSF ants are scarce. We conducted a twelve-month
study on ants in the Sabangau TPSF in Indonesian Borneo using baited traps,
to compare community composition across three disturbance categories (forest
gaps, forest edge and relatively undisturbed interior forest) and between dry and
wet season. The three disturbance categories supported distinct ant communities
across seasons. Differences in canopy cover likely underlie these changes in
ant community composition. Surveying was more effective in the dry season,
because ant capture rates were higher and more indicator taxa were identified
than in the wet season, but overall ant community composition did not differ
significantly between seasons. These findings suggest a potentially useful role
of ants as ecological indicators in TPSF. Further surveys should be conducted in
Sabangau and other TPSFs to test the transferability of our findings.