MonitAnt: Developing a European-level Monitoring strategy for mound-building Formica Ants and symbiont communities residing in nest mounds

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Mound-building Formica ants (MBF) are a group of keystone species widespread in temperate and boreal forests and natural grasslands. They provide important ecosystem functions especially in forest habitats and their large and long-lived nests are habitat to a broad range of other species, so-called mymecophiles, specific to Formica ants. While there is increasing evidence of local declines and extinctions due to fragmentation of their forest habitats, climate change, changing management practices, or conversion of natural grasslands to more intensively used agricultural land an assessment of population trends and threat status of these ants across European countries is largely lacking. This is mainly due to the lack of a common monitoring strategy but also due to differences in conservation status throughout the EU. In addition, it is unknown how the multitude of taxa depending on the peculiar microhabitat of Formica nest mounds, are impacted by the above mentioned threats to MBFs. Therefore, an international, coordinated framework is needed to develop a common cost-effective and efficient monitoring strategy of MBFs and their associated invertebrate communities, allowing a comparison of population trends across Europe. Currently, a wealth of data on the occurrence of mound-building Formica is available in most European countries, often based on local to regional Citizen Science projects as well as monitoring programs inititiated by policymakers, but these are not treated in a Europe-wide consistent way. Within the project MonitAnt we will compare existing monitoring strategies of Citizen Science projects and other monitoring programmes (Theme 1). By compiling the available data, we will be able to inform stakeholders (e.g. national nature conservation and forestry agencies; central and local administrations; EuropaBON) on the current status of MBFs on a transnational level (Theme 3). Within MonitAnt the newly developed monitoring strategy will be validated on a transnational level to include different forest and grassland types (in terms of management and along a large latitudinal and elevational gradients) and potentially refined in the field. This validation phase will be used to collect baseline data on the manifold invertebrate species hosted by these umbrella species as well as thresholds of patch sizes for survival and reproduction characterized to help close current knowledge gaps (Theme 2). MonitAnt aims to deliver a harmonized efficient and cost-effective monitoring strategy that will be made freely available to stakeholders in policymaking but also for citizen science projects with the aim that long-term monitoring of population trends of mound-building Formica ants (MBF) and their associated myrmecophiles is enabled.