Analyzing the impacts of agricultural activities on biodiversity requires a full knowledge of the ecology of the studied species. Using a trait-based approach may improve our ability to understand land use impacts on less well-studied species in order to establish general trends that will facilitate the prediction of these impacts. In this study, we applied a trait-based approach to understand the impact of land use change on ant communities in the Colombian Llanos region. Five common land uses were considered (annual crops, rubber plantations, oil palm plantations, improved pastures and semi-natural savannas) to test whether some morphological traits respond to soil properties and land uses. An RLQ analysis shows a significant common structure between species distribution, environmental factors, and morphological ant traits. This indicates that morphological traits could be used to predict the response of ant communities in different land uses since they respond to environmental characteristics as vegetation complexity, composition and management. Based on the selected morphological ant traits, three groups of land uses were differentiated: grazing-based systems, agroforestry plantations and annual crops. Agroforestry plantations, especially rubber plantations tend to host larger and specialized ant species, while grazing-based systems (i.e. improved pastures) mainly host small and generalist ants, and annual crops host more pigmented ants. These findings suggest that certain morphological traits can reflect the ability of ant species to settle down and survive in a given land use system. Our study shows that improving knowledge about trait-environment associations could be a useful way to better understand how ecological filtering shape neotropical ant communities and how they respond to landscape transformation and land use changes.

分析农业活动对生物多样性的影响需要全面了解所研究物种的生态学。使用基于特征的方法可以提高我们了解土地利用对研究较少的物种的影响的能力，以便建立有助于预测这些影响的总体趋势。在这项研究中，我们应用了一种基于特征的方法来了解土地利用变化对哥伦比亚 Llanos 地区蚂蚁群落的影响。考虑了五种常见的土地利用方式（一年生作物、橡胶种植园、油棕种植园、改良牧场和半天然稀树草原），以测试某些形态特征是否对土壤特性和土地利用有反应。RLQ 分析显示物种分布、环境因素和形态蚂蚁性状之间存在显着的共同结构。这表明形态特征可用于预测蚂蚁群落在不同土地利用中的响应，因为它们响应于植被复杂性、组成和管理等环境特征。根据选择的蚂蚁形态特征，区分了三类土地利用：放牧系统、农林业种植园和一年生作物。农林业种植园，尤其是橡胶种植园，往往会饲养较大和专门的蚂蚁物种，而以放牧为基础的系统（农林业种植园和一年生作物。农林业种植园，尤其是橡胶种植园，往往会饲养较大和专门的蚂蚁物种，而以放牧为基础的系统（农林业种植园和一年生作物。农林业种植园，尤其是橡胶种植园，往往会饲养较大和专门的蚂蚁物种，而以放牧为基础的系统（即。改良牧场）主要寄生小型和通才蚂蚁，一年生作物寄生更多有色蚂蚁。这些发现表明，某些形态特征可以反映蚂蚁物种在给定的土地利用系统中定居和生存的能力。我们的研究表明，提高对性状-环境关联的了解可能是更好地了解生态过滤如何塑造新热带蚂蚁群落以及它们如何应对景观转变和土地利用变化的有用方法。