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Quantifying and understanding the main drivers of biodiversity responses to human disturbances at multiple scales is key to foster effective conservation plans and management systems. Here we report on a detailed regional assessment of the response of ant communities to land-use change and forest disturbance in the Brazilian Amazon. We aimed to explore the effects of land-use intensification at both site and landscape scales, examining variation in ant species richness and composition, and asking which set of environmental variables best predict observed patterns of diversity. We sampled 192 sites distributed across 18 landscapes (each 50 km²) in Paragominas, eastern Brazilian Amazon, covering ca. 20,000 km². We sampled from undisturbed primary forest through varyingly disturbed primary forests, secondary forests, pastures and mechanised agriculture, following a gradient of decreasing total …