Oliveira Eduardo Vinícius da Silva, Landim Myrna Friederichs, Gouveia Sidney F
Graduate Program in Ecology and Conservation, Federal University of Sergipe, São Cristóvão, Sergipe, Brazil.
National Institute of Science and Technology Ecology, Evolution and Conservation of Biodiversity (INCT-EECBio), Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil.
Plant Divers. 2024 Apr 23;46(5):611-620. doi: 10.1016/j.pld.2024.04.006. eCollection 2024 Sep.
Tropical regions have provided new insights into how ecological communities are assembled. In dry coastal communities, water stress has been hypothesized to determine plant assembly structure by favoring preadapted lineages from neighboring ecosystems, consistent with functional clustering. However, it is unclear whether this hypothesis is sufficient to explain how coastal communities in tropical ecosystems are assembled. Here, we test whether water stress or other factors drive community assembly in woody plant communities across the coastal zone of Brazil, a tropical ecosystem. We characterized functional and phylogenetic structures of these communities and determined the underlying environmental factors (e.g., water stress, historical climate stability, edaphic constraints, and habitat heterogeneity) that drive their community assembly. Assemblages of coastal woody species show geographically varied patterns, including stochastic arrangements, clustering, and overdispersion of species relative to their traits and phylogenetic relatedness. Topographic complexity, water vapor pressure, and soil nutrient availability best explained the gradient in the functional structure. Water deficit, water vapor pressure, and soil organic carbon were the best predictors of variation in phylogenetic structure. Our results support the water-stress conservatism hypothesis on functional and phylogenetic structure, as well as the effect of habitat heterogeneity on functional structure and edaphic constraints on functional and phylogenetic structure. These effects are associated with increased phenotypic and phylogenetic divergence of woody plant assemblages, which is likely mediated by abiotic filtering and niche opportunities, suggesting a complex pattern of ecological assembly.
热带地区为生态群落如何形成提供了新的见解。在干旱的沿海群落中，有人提出水分胁迫通过青睐来自邻近生态系统的预先适应的谱系来决定植物的组装结构，这与功能聚类一致。然而，尚不清楚这一假设是否足以解释热带生态系统中沿海群落是如何形成的。在这里，我们测试水分胁迫或其他因素是否驱动了巴西热带生态系统沿海地区木本植物群落的群落形成。我们对这些群落的功能和系统发育结构进行了表征，并确定了驱动其群落形成的潜在环境因素（如水分胁迫、历史气候稳定性、土壤限制和栖息地异质性）。沿海木本物种的组合呈现出地理上不同的模式，包括随机排列、聚类以及物种相对于其性状和系统发育相关性的过度分散。地形复杂性、水汽压和土壤养分有效性最能解释功能结构的梯度变化。水分亏缺、水汽压和土壤有机碳是系统发育结构变化的最佳预测因子。我们的结果支持了关于功能和系统发育结构的水分胁迫保守性假设，以及栖息地异质性对功能结构的影响和土壤限制对功能和系统发育结构的影响。这些影响与木本植物组合中表型和系统发育差异的增加有关，这可能是由非生物过滤和生态位机会介导的，表明了一种复杂的生态组装模式。
