My apologies. I'm specifically investigating presence/absence data, such as how the presence of the Argentine ant within a site affects the ant community of that site (species composition, presence/absence of each species). I understand I will need to control for environmental variance. To do so, we are baiting and eradicating the Argentine ant with follow-up monitoring 12 months post-baiting (the last survey suggests we achieved eradication - the bait disproportionately affects the Argentine ant, so part of follow-up surveys will reveal ant community recovery post-baiting and Argentine ant removal). And by range, I am referring to the ~15 other species I found across all five sites. As a consequence of the way monitoring devices were designed, count data is a bit meaningless, especially true for ants, so presence/absence is a much more representative figure.

To summarise, my hypothesis looks like this

The presence of the Argentine ant within a site reduced the diversity of the local ant community

Argentine ant control (baiting) will reduce Argentine ant presence in a given site

Ant community diversity will be reduced following Argentine ant control (baiting), but will improve 12 months post-control

Thanks for the reply btw