Abstract
Plant communities are shaped by multiple factors along environmental gradients; however, studies are limited on how environmental filtering drives community composition and species richness on tropical inselbergs. We evaluate the influence of altitude and climatic variables related to temperature and precipitation on plant community composition and species richness on Brazilian inselbergs. We assume as a premise that both climate and altitude would induce changes on plant community composition and species richness at the local level. We used plant inventory data from 370 sampling units across four inselberg sites in the Atlantic Forest of Espírito Santo State, south-eastern Brazil. We tested the univariate and multivariate effects of altitude and climate variables on community composition and species richness with multiple models. Differences in species richness between inselbergs were evaluated using sample-based data to estimate rarefaction and extrapolation curves. In addition, differences in species composition and taxonomic beta diversity were examined via novel frequency-based metrics. A contrasting climate pattern was observed between the inselberg sites, with south sites being wet compared to the dry conditions found in northern sites. Species richness by rarefaction showed a similar pattern within regional sites; however, there were marked differences between regions. Species richness and beta diversity showed significant differences among sites, with higher values in southern sites than in northern sites. In a multi-model comparison between inselberg sites, altitude significantly influenced community composition and species richness and explained more variance than climate models. This finding suggested that climate could act to some extent on these tropical inselbergs; however, altitude was a better predictor of plant community composition and species richness at the local level.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) for providing scholarships to the first and second authors, respectively. This study is part of the master’s thesis of the first author. We are grateful to the Programa de Pós-graduação em Biodiversidade Tropical (PPGBT/UFES) for facilities to develop this research. We acknowledge the Instituto Estadual de Meio Ambiente e Recursos Hídricos (IEMA) for the research license and structure in the conservation units. We thank IF Ribeiro, C Covre and WJ Souza for help with fieldwork. We are also grateful to DR Couto for helped at the beginning of this study, for suggestions and plant identification. We thank RC Forzza, CN Fraga, LJC Kollmann and I Cordeiro, who also kindly helped with plant identification.
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Pinto-Junior, H.V., Villa, P.M., de Menezes, L.F.T. et al. Effect of climate and altitude on plant community composition and richness in Brazilian inselbergs. J. Mt. Sci. 17, 1931–1941 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5801-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5801-4