&lt;b&gt;Floristic-structural relationships between Canga ferruginous tree communities and adjacent vegetation types

Cléber Rodrigo De Souza,Rubens Manoel Dos Santos,Felipe De Carvalho Araújo,Jean Daniel Morel,Gislene De Carvalho Castro,Henrique Faria De Oliveira,Maria Teresa Rodrigues Costa,Polyanne Aparecida Coelho,Alisson Borges Miranda Santos

doi:10.4025/actascibiolsci.v40i1.39466

<b>Floristic-structural relationships between Canga ferruginous tree communities and adjacent vegetation types

Cléber Rodrigo De Souza, Rubens Manoel Dos Santos + Show 7 more

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https://doi.org/10.4025/actascibiolsci.v40i1.39466

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Abstract

Our objective was to evaluate the floristic and structural relationships between Canga tree communities and other vegetation types inserted in the physiognomic units set, in order to test the hypothesis that these communities have unique characteristics due to their specific environmental conditions. For this, we compared the structural and floristic attributes of Canga vegetation with adjacent semideciduous seasonal forest, Savanna and ecotone areas, evaluating the similarity in its behavior. Our results demonstrate the existence of distinct relationships among vegetation types in relation to different perspectives, related to macro-scale environmental attributes and to the phytogeographic context. In general, Canga tree vegetation has its structure associated with open vegetation types, such as the Cerrado (Savanna) and its composition associated with forest vegetation types, constituted by a community with specific ecological characteristics. Our results suggest the presence of ferruginous soils as a factor that contributes to environmental and ecological heterogeneity in vegetation matrices.

Highlights

The vegetation types demonstrated different density (F = 25.77, gl = 24 and p < 0.01), basal area (F test = 66.97, gl = 24 and p < 0.01), richness estimated by rarefaction (Figure 3), Shannon diversity index (H '), and Pielou’s evenness (J') (Table 2)
detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) resulted in eigenvalues of 0.98 for axis 1 to 0.59 and for axis 2, which sets long-range scenario of high replacement species for both directions (Figure 5)
Our results indicate that the Canga tree community presents specific structural behavior and floristic composition within the system, resulting from the association with the other vegetation types and conditions present there

Summary

Introduction

Environments under soils with iron saturation, so-called ‘bounded iron formation’, such as Brazilian ‘Canga’ (Skirycz et al, 2014) and ‘African ferrictes’ (Porembski, Fischer, & Biedinger, 1997) are commonly associated with high biological diversity and endemism (Jacobi, Carmo, Vincent, & Stehmann, 2007; Gibson, Yates, & Dillon, 2010; Fernandes, Maia, Monteiro, & Condé, 2016) The presence of this factor is reported as influential to the mesofauna (Moras, Gomes, & Tavares, 2015), underground biology (Ferreira, 2005), avifauna (Pacheco et al, 2007), ecological interactions (Jacobi & Antonini, 2008; Dáttilo et al, 2014), and to vegetation characteristics (Jacobi et al, 2007; Vincent & Meguro, 2008; Gibson et al, 2010; Gibson, Meissner, Markey, & Thompson, 2012). Local variation of these edaphic attributes in the landscape context (environmental heterogeneity) may originate, associated to phytogeographic influences, diverse combinations of species with different structural behaviors, acting as diversity agent (Hutchings, John, & Wijesinghe, 2003; John et al, 2007)

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