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Invasive grasses and native Asteraceae in the Brazilian Cerrado

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Abstract

Anthropogenic disturbances frequently modify natural disturbance regimes and foster the invasion and spread of nonindigenous species. However, there is some dispute about whether disturbance events or invasive plants themselves are the major factors promoting the local extinction of native plant species. Here, we used a set of savanna remnants comprising a gradient of invasive grass cover to evaluate whether the species richness of Asteraceae, a major component of the Brazilian Cerrado, is affected by invasive grass cover, or alternatively, whether variation in richness can be directly ascribed to disturbance-related variables. Furthermore, we evaluate whether habitat-specialist Asteraceae differ from habitat generalist species in their responses to grass invasion. Abundance and species richness showed unimodal variation along the invasive grass gradient for both total Asteraceae and habitat-generalists. The cerrado-specialist species, however, showed no clear variation from low-to-intermediate levels of grass cover, but declined monotonically from intermediate-to-higher levels. Through a structural equation model, we found that only invasive grass cover had significant effects on both abundance and species density of Asteraceae. The effect of invasive grass cover was especially high on the cerrado-specialist species, whose proportion declined consistently with increasing invasive dominance. Our results support the prediction that invasive grasses reduce the floristic uniqueness of pristine vegetation physiognomies.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Yu Jie Ahn, Rosane Picon, Martin Videla, Marina Braun, Mário Ferreira-Neto, Tehra Mendonça, and Marília Santiago for helping us with fieldwork, and to João Semir, Roberto Esteves, and Mara Magenta for providing or confirming identification of Asteraceae. Earlier versions of this manuscript were improved by Vania Pivello, Glauco Machado, André V. L. Freitas, Gustavo Romero, Richard Warwick, Mike Austin, Ingolf Kühn, and three anonymous referees. This study is part of MAN’s PhD thesis presented to the Graduate Program in Ecology at Unicamp, and was supported by FAPESP grants # 98/05085-2 to TML within the BIOTA-FAPESP Program, # 04/15482-1 to TML, # 03/02541-0 and # 06/56889-2 to MAN, and CNPq grant # 306049/2004 to TML.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Depto. Ecologia, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade de Brasília (UnB), 70919-970, Brasilia, DF, Brazil

    Mário Almeida-Neto

  2. Curso de Pós-graduação em Ecologia, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, Brazil

    Mário Almeida-Neto, Umberto Kubota & Guilherme H. Aguirre

  3. Depto. Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), 05508-900, São Paulo, SP, Brazil

    Paulo I. Prado

  4. Laboratório de Interações Insetos-Plantas, Depto. Biologia Animal, Instituto de Biologia, UNICAMP, 13083-970, Campinas, SP, Brazil

    Umberto Kubota & Thomas M. Lewinsohn

  5. Curso de Pós-graduação em Genética e Biologia Molecular, Instituto de Biologia , UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil

    Joice M. Bariani

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  1. Mário Almeida-Neto
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  2. Paulo I. Prado
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  3. Umberto Kubota
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Correspondence to Mário Almeida-Neto.

Electronic supplementary material

A table listing the Asteraceae species recorded in this study and their classification as cerrado specialists, habitat generalists and exotics.

Supplementary material 1 (DOC 90 kb)

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Almeida-Neto, M., Prado, P.I., Kubota, U. et al. Invasive grasses and native Asteraceae in the Brazilian Cerrado. Plant Ecol 209, 109–122 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-010-9727-8

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