Abstract: An investigation was carried out in the primary broad-leaved Korean pine forest in Shengshan Nature Reserve in 2019 to clarify the impacts of ant nests on the composition and diversity of other ground-dwelling arthropods. The trap method was used to collect ants and other ground-dwelling arthropods. A total of 92266 ground-dwelling arthropods belonging to eight groups were captured, including Centipede, Arachnid, Malarcana, Arachnid, Macrocephalus, Carabidae, Paederanidae, and Silphidae. The presence of ant nests and the distance to ant nests significantly impacted the abundance of other ground-dwelling arthropods, with the impacts varying across groups. The presence of ant nests increased individual abundance of Centipede and Arachnid, decreased that of Arachnid, Malarcana and Carabidae, but did not affect Silphidae and Paederidae. The Shannon, Pielou and Simpson indices of other ground-dwelling arthropod communities were higher in the control plots and the communities far away from the ant nests. The beta diversity of the other ground-dwelling arthropod communities in plots having ant nests was higher, which mainly composed of spatial species turnover, indicating that there was higher spatial species replacement and that the presence of ant nests led to a larger difference of community composition. Our results indicate that the presence of ant nests and the distance to ant nests are important factors affecting the diversity of other ground-dwelling arthropod communities.

Key words: Shengshan Nature Reserve, primary broad-leaved Korean pine forest, ant nest, ground-dwelling-arthropods.