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).