Abstract Habitat transformation and disturbance are important threats to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem function, and can strongly affect ant communities. As with other animal communities, disturbance impact will depend on frequency and intensity of disturbance. Anthropogenic habitat transformation where the degree of change in resources and microclimate may be especially severe (e.g. mining or urbanization) or repeated (e.g. agriculture), have strong impacts on ant assemblages. In contrast, some natural disturbances, such as fire, tree‐fall gaps, and short floods, although drastic in their immediate effects, may have minimal impacts on the assemblages if entire colonies are not lost, or if foundresses colonize disturbed sites quickly. Disturbed sites tend to be dominated by opportunistic or generalist species presumably because these species can take advantage of changing resource bases. Ants provide essential ecosystem functions such as biological pest control, seed dispersal, and soil modification, many of which are affected by habitat transformation and disturbance.