Similarity among eucalyptus planted areas based on leaf-cutting ant nest sizes

Abstract

Techniques for leaf-cutting ant control have been investigated in literature due to the importance of the damage they cause to agriculture. Plantations with large territorial extensions, which can be contiguous or not, are usually subdivided into local administration to collect data to determine the frequencies and area occupied by ant nests. The objective of this work was to build a relationship of similarities among different geographical regions using the frequency data and size of nests by applying Information Bottleneck method and principal component analysis. The approach was applied to data of leaf-cutting ants of the genus Atta in cultivated Eucalyptus spp. forests in São Paulo State, Brazil. The results showed similar regions that are not geographically close, regarding the occurrence of nests. With this information, administrators will be able to coordinate more precisely the allocation of bait, material and workers in regions with vast territories, avoiding resources waste.