The role of termites in mitigating the effects of drought across tropical landscapes

Funded by the Research Grants Council General Research Fund 2021

Tropical rainforests contain the highest levels of terrestrial biodiversity and influence climatic cycles on a local and global scale. They face multiple anthropogenic threats including logging, agricultural transformation and climate change. Land-use change leads to hotter and drier conditions in tropical landscapes, and climate change is simultaneously predicted to bring more frequent and severe droughts to many tropical regions. The impacts of these interacting threats, and others, on the provision of ecosystem services by tropical rainforests is largely unquantified.

         Insects play a vital but mostly unrecognised role in maintaining ecosystem functions in tropical rainforests. Termites, for example, are of the most abundant tropical insect taxa and important decomposers and soil engineers, but they remain largely understudied. We are combining experimental drought and termite suppression in both primary and logged forest to understand the future of tropical ecosystem functioning as well as informing land-managers about the benefits of maintaining insect diversity in human modified landscapes.