Dados do Trabalho

Título:

VEGETATION STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION AS PREDICTORS OF SMALL MAMMAL ASSEMBLAGES

Resumo:

Whether diversity and composition of animal communities are determined by vegetation structure or composition has been an ongoing debate. However, due to combined shortcomings of data and methodology, vegetation structure was prioritized when trying to understand the effects of vegetation upon animal communities, while effects of composition remained unexplored and considered secondary to structure. Efforts comparing vegetation structure and composition effects on animal species were mainly focused on birds, with other animal taxa receiving little attention. Here, we explored the relative importance of vegetation structure and composition on the prediction of small mammals assemblages for an Atlantic Forest landscape. Compositional (small mammals and woody plants) and vegetation structural data were collected in 20 forest fragments in the Guapi-Macacu river basin, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We used direct ordination techniques (co-correspondence and canonical correspondence analysis) to compare the predictive capacities of vegetation structure and composition on small mammal composition. Plant composition explained more variation of small mammals composition than vegetation structure, but more importantly, plant composition and structure explained different parts of the variation of small mammal composition. Therefore, vegetation structure and composition are closely linked and have complementary roles for small mammal communities. Our results conflict with the traditional view that vegetation structure alone is the most influential to animal species. We demonstrate that disentangling the role of vegetation composition on animal community composition is a complex task, nevertheless, a fundamental one to accurately apply conservation actions targeting animal communities.
co-correspondence analysis; plant community; plant-mammal interaction; community structure; tropical forest.

Financiamento:

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) provided a MSc fellowship to FLS, MVV was supported by a research fellowship (bolsista de produtividade) by CNPq.

Área

Ecologia