Abstract
The species abundance distribution of ecological communities has been represented through several mathematical models, of which the most common are: geometric series, logseries, lognormal, and a type of broken stick, this latter found only in animal communities. There is no consensus on the underlying biological processes, but initial observations on plant communities related these models to equilibrium and high richness (lognormal), stress or disturbance and low richness (logseries and geometric series). Recently the value of these relationships was challenged, and other descriptors were considered better predictors of richness, disturbance and stress. We aimed at investigating how these models and their parameters, as well as dominance and evenness are related with species richness, stress and disturbance in six tropical forest communities, SE Brazil: two well-conserved fragments, two disturbed by fire, and two swampy forests (anoxic stress). The models did not show consistent relationships with richness, disturbance or stress. The parameters and indices of diversity α (logseries) and λ (lognormal) varied closely with richness, and the dominance was larger in the communities submitted to stress or disturbance. Our results indicate the need of further studies in order to validate (or refute) the use of abundance distribution models for detection of patterns related to richness, stress or disturbance in tropical arboreal communities. On the other hand, richness and dominance did respond to disturbance and stress.
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We thank to the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq for the grants for the first author; to John Du Vall Hay, Miguel Petrere Junior and Kikyo Yamamoto for the critical reading of the manuscript; to Steven M. Holland for providing a software for the calculation of the variance of S(m) (available from www.uga.edu/~strata/software).
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Cielo Filho, R., Martins, F.R. & Gneri, M.A. Fitting abundance distribution models in tropical arboreal communities of SE Brazil. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 3, 169–180 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.3.2002.2.4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.3.2002.2.4