Oliveira-Junior José Max Barbosa, Juen Leandro
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Zoologia, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia, Laboratório de Ecologia e Conservação, Universidade Federal do Pará, Rua Augusto Correia, Nº 1, Bairro Guamá, CEP: 66075-110, Belém, Pará, Brazil.
Instituto de Ciências e Tecnologia das Águas, Universidade Federal do Oeste do Pará, Rua Vera Paz, s/n (Unidade Tapajós) Bairro Salé, CEP: 68040-255, Santarém, Pará, Brazil.
Insects. 2019 Sep 27;10(10):322. doi: 10.3390/insects10100322.
The evaluation of the effects of environmental factors on natural communities has been one of the principal approaches in ecology; although, over the past decade, increasing importance has been given to spatial factors. In this context, we evaluated the relative importance of environmental and spatial factors for the structuring of the local odonate communities in preserved and altered streams. Adult Odonata were sampled in 98 streams in eastern Amazonia, Brazil. The physical features of each stream were evaluated and spatial variables were generated. Only environmental factors accounted for the variation in the Odonata community. The same pattern was observed in the suborder Zygoptera. For Anisoptera, environmental factors alone affect the variation in the community, considering all the environments together, and the altered areas on their own. As the two Odonata suborders presented distinct responses to environmental factors, this partitioning may contribute to an improvement in the precision of studies in biomonitoring. We thus suggest that studies would have a greater explanatory potential if additional variables are included, related to biotic interactions (e.g., competition). This will require further investigation on a finer scale of environmental variation to determine how the Odonata fauna of Amazonian streams behaves under this analytical perspective.
评估环境因素对自然群落的影响一直是生态学的主要研究方法之一；不过，在过去十年中，空间因素的重要性日益凸显。在此背景下，我们评估了环境和空间因素对保留和改变的溪流中当地蜻蜓目群落结构的相对重要性。在巴西亚马逊东部的98条溪流中对成年蜻蜓目昆虫进行了采样。评估了每条溪流的物理特征并生成了空间变量。只有环境因素导致了蜻蜓目群落的变化。在均翅亚目中也观察到了相同的模式。对于差翅亚目，综合考虑所有环境以及单独的改变区域，仅环境因素影响群落的变化。由于蜻蜓目的两个亚目对环境因素表现出不同的反应，这种划分可能有助于提高生物监测研究的精度。因此，我们建议，如果纳入与生物相互作用（如竞争）相关的其他变量，研究将具有更大的解释潜力。这将需要在更精细的环境变化尺度上进行进一步调查，以确定亚马逊溪流的蜻蜓目动物群在这种分析视角下的行为表现。
