Home – Home – Jornals – Contemporary Problems of Ecology 2004 number 4

Optimal conditions for ants in the Edigan basin are peculiar to well-warmed pine and small-leaved forest; suboptimal ones, to meadows, meadow and stony steppes; pessimal conditions, to park larch forests, shrub-grown slopes and real steppes; and extreme ones where ants occur only along road sides, to dark coniferous forests. The heterogeneity of the ant population in the basin is determined by the extent of tree crown shading (depending on forest density and the composition of the forest-forming tree types), by the extent of shrub overgrowth, and in open meadows and steppe habitats by the productivity of phytocenoses (meadows, meadow steppes, real steppes), and by their stoniness. The damage in money terms to the ant population due to the construction of the Katun and Chemal hydroelectric power stations, calculated using the procedure proposed by the present authors, is twice as great as the damage to the vertebrates estimated by other authors, and nearly three times as great as that to the invertebrates determined approximately from the correlation between the existence energy of vertebrates and that of invertebrates as the measure of their ecosystem significance.