Figure 4. Effects of horizontal and vertical distance on abundance based
pairwise dissimilarity of ant assemblages. Grey bands show 95%
confidence intervals. Dissimilarity close to one indicates that two
assemblages are highly different, while dissimilarity close to zero
indicates that they are very similar.
By comparing the effects of vertical distance on assemblage
dissimilarity within vertical transect and effects of horizontal
distance within vertical strata, we found greater small-scale pairwise
dissimilarity (higher intercepts) over horizontal distance within the
same vertical strata than over vertical distance within the same
vertical transect (linear regression: F 1, 17 =
25.93, P <0.001, R2 = 0.60,
Table S4, Fig. 5A,). However, the effects of vertical distance on
pairwise dissimilarity was much stronger than that of horizontal
distance, presenting a distance-decay pattern within each transect
(linear regression: F 1, 17 = 46.45, P<0.001, R2 = 0.73, Table S4, Fig.
5B).