Environmental drivers organize woody plant assemblages across a cerrado vegetation mosaic in Northern Brazil

Abstract

The objective was to approach a mosaic of savanna vegetation (marginal-MS and disjunct-DS areas) in Brazilian Northern Cerrado to investigate the role played by environmental drivers as determinants of community organization at a spatial scale in order to understand the divergent patterns along an environmental gradient. We analyzed spatial, edaphic, and climatic predictors across 21 tree communities of Cerrado, comprising 235 species, 154 genera and 52 families. The results suggest significant spatial dependence among assemblages, despite their functioning as independent ecological systems. They also confirmed which although the effects of the concentrations of edaphic attributes were not homogeneous, they evidenced that climatic and spatial factors were responsible for greater explanation of the data. The ordination analyzes indicated an environmental gradient with high species turnover and a mosaic of individual floras along the spatial gradient. Eight species contributed with at least 70% of the turnover among the subgroups. The most influential drivers were precipitation, thermal amplitude, elevation, latitudinal-longitudinal spatialization of the areas and aluminum content.