Abstract
Urban areas are strongly transformed by the human population and these environmental changes can affect the richness and composition of invasive alien trees (IAT) across cities. In this study, we investigate the role of urbanization and climate variables on richness and species composition of IAT in cities from Brazil. We investigated (i) the relative contribution and how variables related to urbanization affects the patterns of richness and composition; and (ii) the relative contribution and how variables related to climate affects richness and composition of IAT. Thus, we used occurrences of IAT in 93 urban areas in Brazil gathered from 130 references. We tested the variation partitioning using three models with variables related to urbanization, climate, and spatial correlation for richness and species composition of IAT. Next, we tested the significance of each set of variables on the richness and species composition of IAT. Urbanization variables explained 18% of the variation in species richness of IAT, whereas climate explained 18% of the variation in species composition of IAT. Demographic density (habitants per km2) positively affected the richness of IAT, whereas the percentage of urban forest influenced species composition. Köppen climate zones affected richness while the covariate temperature annual range had a negative effect on richness. Temperature annual range, annual precipitation, precipitation of driest quarter, and precipitation of warmest quarter affected the species composition of IAT. We confirmed urban variables have a relevant influence on species richness, but climate variables are still important to understand the composition of IAT across cities. Thus, species richness is affected at a local scale by urbanization, and species composition by climate at broader scales.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Anne-Sophie de Almeida, Bráulio Santos, Bruno de Macêdo, Carla dos Santos, Deivid Kern, Frederico Guilherme, Gislene dos Santos, Kendra Zamproni, Laís Petri, Marcus Liesenfeld, Renato Pinheiro, Richieri Sartori, Rúbia Fonseca, and their coauthor for making available part of the data used here and for sharing their experience in the field; and André R. Farias for making available the shapefile of Urban Areas of Brazil in 2015. We also thank Dr. Danilo R. M. Neves, Dr. Marcus W. Beck, and Dr. Matthew J. Hill for the helpful information and suggestions about the analysis; and Dr. Johannes Kollmann and the anonymous reviewers for the helpful improvements suggested in the manuscript. GH thanks the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (Capes) for supporting his postdoctoral work. PMV was supported by the Special Project of CNPq-Brazil (grant number 150182/2021-0). RDZ acknowledges funding from CNPq-Brazil (grant number 304701/2019-0).
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Conceptualization: Gustavo Heringer and Rafael Dudeque Zenni; Methodology: Gustavo Heringer, Lucas Del Bianco Faria, Pedro Manuel Villa, and Rafael Dudeque Zenni; Database organization: Gustavo Heringer, Ana Luiza Botan, and Amanda Araujo; Formal analysis and investigation: Gustavo Heringer and Pedro Manuel Villa; Writing – original draft preparation: Gustavo Heringer; Writing – review and editing: all authors; Supervision: Rafael Dudeque Zenni.
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11252_2021_1189_MOESM1_ESM.xlsx
Supplementary file1 (XLSX 43 KB). Supplementary Material 1, Table S1: List of ID with reference source, county, and geographical coordinates. Supplementary Material 1, Table S2: Richness of invasive alien trees (IAT) per climate zones of Köppen. Supplementary Material 1, Table S3: List of invasive alien trees and frequency of occurrence. Supplementary Material 1, Table S4: Richness of invasive alien trees (IAT) per city.
11252_2021_1189_MOESM2_ESM.docx
Supplementary file2 (DOCX 210 KB). Supplementary Material 2, Fig. 1: Effect of urbanization and climate factors on richness and species composition of the invasive alien tree (IAT). Supplementary Material 2, Table S1: Effect of spatial factors on richness of invasive alien tree (IAT) based on three GLM with quasipoisson distribution. Supplementary Material 2, Table S2: Effect of spatial factors on species composition of invasive alien tree (IAT) based on “envfit” analysis (package “vegan” v. 2.5-6; Oksanen et al. 2019).
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Heringer, G., Del Bianco Faria, L., Villa, P.M. et al. Urbanization affects the richness of invasive alien trees but has limited influence on species composition. Urban Ecosyst 25, 753–763 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-021-01189-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-021-01189-1