Abstract
A comprehensive census of a hectare of cerrado s.s. in southeastern Brazil, a small-tree and scrub woodland physiognomy, allowed the evaluation of whether pollination and dispersal modes are correlated with the stratification of the vegetation and if so, in what way. Generalist pollination, and pollination by small bees, as well as ornithophily and anemophily were more frequent in the lower layers (ground and scrub), while species pollinated by large bees and beetles are more or less equally distributed among the ground, scrub and tree layers. The three nocturnal pollination modes, phalenophily, sphingophily, and chiropterophily indicated a preference for the upper layers (tree and scrub). Zoochory predominated in the tree layer, but autochory increased towards the ground at the expense of anemochory and zoochory. We discuss possible reasons for the height distribution of pollination and seed dispersal modes and compare the situation in Cerrado with other Neotropical forests.
Highlights
The Cerrado is a species-rich vegetation, which originally covered an area of 1.5 to 2 million sq. km of the Brazilian territory
A comprehensive census of a hectare of cerrado s.s. in southeastern Brazil, a small-tree and scrub woodland physiognomy, allowed the evaluation of whether pollination and dispersal modes are correlated with the stratification of the vegetation and if so, in what way
The distribution of flowering and fruiting species in the cerrado s.s. hectare varied among the three height classes
Summary
The Cerrado is a species-rich vegetation, which originally covered an area of 1.5 to 2 million sq. km (or 20 % to 25 %) of the Brazilian territory. The Cerrado is a species-rich vegetation, which originally covered an area of 1.5 to 2 million sq. A more precise estimate of the total Cerrado biome area reaches 1.910 million km. 20 %, made up by other vegetation types in the Cerrado biome, for instance, upland forests, gallery forests, limestone forests, veredas, marshy campos, hummock campos, campos rupestres, white-sand savanna patches (Eiten 1972), are subtracted, the original area of Cerrado sensu lato (Cerrado in its wide sense, including all physiognomies) would be about 1,530 million km (Gottsberger & Silberbauer-Gottsberger 2006a). The cerrado sensu lato (cerrado s.l.), besides of being species-rich, has a series of different vegetation forms or physiognomies, from forests, over woodlands, savannas to grasslands, which originally, before the arrival of the Europeans all occurred naturally.
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