Abstract Ants play key role in environment management due to their abundance, Diversity and functional importance. The present study examined the ant species diversity and relative abundance in coffee agro-ecosystem of Wayanad region of the Western Ghats (11⁰.27’00”&11⁰.58’52” and the East Longitude 75⁰.47’50”&76⁰.27’35”) under different intensity of canopies. Ants were recorded from August 2022 to September 2023 from all three sampling locations belonging to six coffee plantations ie; Site 1-Highly Shaded (HSC), Site 2-Moderately Shaded (MSC) and Site 3 -open (OC) coffee plantation. Ants were sampled by using pitfall traps, honey baits, litter sifting, soil core extraction, and transect sampling methods. During the study period, a total of 5311 individual ants were collected representing 51 species in 26 genera, and six subfamilies. The distribution of ants in different subfamily showed a dominance of Formicinae with seventeen morpho-species (32%) followed by Myrmicinae (28%). Shannon-Weiner (H¹) diversity index value of site 1 has 3.435 while site 2 has an H¹ value of 3.477and site 3 has 3.197. Site 2 has a slightly higher H¹ value than site 1 owing to its high species richness of 48 ant species and site 3 has lowest H¹ value with 38 ant species. Site 3 has higher Simpson’s (D) diversity index value than site 2 and site 1. High species dominance in habitat would automatically mean that there would be low evenness.
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Venugopal et al. (2024) studied this question.
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