Abstract:
Humans pose a major threat to many species through land-use change in virtually every habitat.
However, the extent of this threat is largely unknown for invertebrates due to challenges with
investigating their distributions at large scales. This knowledge gap is particularly troublesome for
soil macrofauna because of the critical roles many of these organisms perform as ecosystem
engineers. We used a combination of high-resolution airborne Light Detection and Ranging and
deep learning models to map the distribution of the ecologically important termite genus
Macrotermes across a South African savanna land-use gradient, quantifying the effects of land-use
change on patterns of mound densities, heights and spatial patterning. Despite significant
anthropogenic alteration to landscapes, termite mounds persisted and shared a number of
similarities to mounds in untransformed areas. Mean mound height was not substantially reduced
in transformed landscapes, and over-dispersion of mounds at localized scales was conserved.
However, mound densities were partially reduced, and height distributions in transformed areas
differed to those in protected areas. Our findings suggest that mound-building termites persist
even in areas of relatively high human disturbance, but also highlight important differences in
termite distributions that could lead to reductions in ecosystem services provided by termites in
human-modified landscapes. The persistence of at least half of mounds in human-modified
landscapes could serve as starting points for savanna restoration.
