Published in Environmental Entomology

In “Effects of Urbanization on the Diversity, Abundance, and Composition of Ant Assemblages in an Arid City” past visiting assistant professor Javier Miguelena and Paul Baker sampled the ant assemblages of three habitat types (irrigated neighborhood parks, urban desert remnants, and preserved deserts) in Tucson, Arizona, to assess the effects of urbanization, fragmentation, and land-use change in an arid city. They found that “arid urban ecosystems may include considerable biodiversity, in part thanks to increased landscape heterogeneity resulting from the irrigation of green areas.”