ANTBLITZ at the Armidale Tree Group!

A WHOLE WEEKEND of investigating ant communities at the Armidale Tree Group: SATURDAY 20 – SUNDAY 21 September.

School of Ants will use ants as simple bioindicators of ecosystem health and recovery, and you’re invited to contribute to this research.

We’re interested in how the resident ant communities of the various management regimes at the Tree Group’s Black Gully site change over time. Currently, there are a variety of habitats managed for different reasons in Black Gully, ranging from native grassland areas to disturbed ground ready for planting. We would expect the ant communities in these various sites to differ in species composition, diversity and richness, but given a long term trajectory of management at the site for a single native vegetation and wetland ecosystem, we would expect ant communities over time to merge, reflecting a merging of management regimes to an overall more similar and healthy ecosystem.

Citizens can be scientists for a weekend and help collect data that will start this long term bioindicator project for the Armidale Tree Group. We’ve got scheduled pitfall trapping, litter sampling, and hand collections of ants in several different stages of revegetation at the Tree Group site. You can come for an hour or stay the whole day!

Just turn up and you can participate. There will be something happening all day Sunday!

CLICK HERE for the schedule for weekend.