Abstract
The aim of the present study was to present the wealth, ecological characteristics and the floristic similarity of ferns and lycophytes from two forest areas of the municipality of Campo Mour?o, PR, Brazil. The vegetation of the municipality is characterized mainly by an ecotone between the Seasonal Semideciduous Forest and Mixed Ombrophilous Forest. We recorded 56 species, distributed in 31 genera and 16 families. The most representative families were Pteridaceae (14) and Polypodiaceae (11) and the wealthier genre was Thelypteris (6). The terricolous species were predominant (72%) and the preferential environments were riparian vegetation and forest interior (70%). The flora of Campo Mour?o was more similar to the studies conducted in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and the cophenetic correlation coefficient (r = 0.9058) showed a consistent adjust. In the principal components analysis (PCA) the variance explained by the two principal components was 72.99%. The wealth found in this study corresponds to approximately 11.4% of the flora of ferns and lycophytes of Parana. Future contributions are needed to increase the knowledge about the flora of ferns and lycophytes in areas of ecotone, mainly in the region of Campo Mour?o, where the studies are scarce.
Highlights
Until the beginning of the 1990s, ferns and lycophytes were treated as a single group of plants and generally classified as belonging to a single paraphyletic division, called Pteridophyte (Prado & Sylvestre, 2010)
The form of terricolous life was observed in 72% of the species and showed association with the environment of riparian vegetation
The low similarity found in this study is mainly related to the fact that most comparative studies have been carried out in other states, and to the great variation of the biomes present in these areas
Summary
Until the beginning of the 1990s, ferns and lycophytes were treated as a single group of plants and generally classified as belonging to a single paraphyletic division, called Pteridophyte (Prado & Sylvestre, 2010). As a result of the recognition of paraphyletic groups, several families started to have a lower number of genera and species, while others were united, becoming even larger (e.g. Hymenophyllopsidaceae and Cyatheaceae), and the evolutionary positioning of some groups, before uncertain, has become more clear (Prado & Sylvestre, 2010). Its distribution is not uniform, and that areas such as the Brazilian Amazon Plain presents a much lower number of species in relation to mountainous areas, such as Ridge of Sea and the Andes, for example (Tryon, 1986; Moran, 1995)
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