Abstract
Ecological communities are structured by both deterministic and stochastic processes. We investigated phylogenetic patterns at regional and local scales to understand the influences of seasonal processes in shaping the structure of anuran communities in the southern Pantanal wetland, Brazil. We assessed the phylogenetic structure at different scales, using the Net Relatedness Index (NRI), the Nearest Taxon Index (NTI), and phylobetadiversity indexes, as well as a permutation test, to evaluate the effect of seasonality. The anuran community was represented by a non-random set of species with a high degree of phylogenetic relatedness at the regional scale. However, at the local scale the phylogenetic structure of the community was weakly related with the seasonality of the system, indicating that oriented stochastic processes (e.g. colonization, extinction and ecological drift) and/or antagonist forces drive the structure of such communities in the southern Pantanal.
Highlights
Which forces shape biodiversity patterns? This is one of the central questions driving many biodiversity studies [1]
Considering the mean phylogenetic distance to the nearest taxon, the 16 species comprising the Nhecolândia anuran community were significantly more closely related than randomly expected from the 44 species pool of potential colonizers (NTI = 1.73, p = 0.004), indicating that Nhecolândia harbors a non-random, phylogenetically clustered subset of the Pantanal anurans. This trend disappeared when we considered the overall measure of phylogenetic distance (NRI = -0.14; p>0.05), suggesting that basal clades for Nhecolândia anura are random samples from the overall Pantanal pool
Species richness was on average greater in the rainy than in the dry season, the phylogenetic structure of most communities did not differ significantly from random samples drawn from the 16 species pool of Nhecolândia anurans
Summary
Our objective was to identify the role of either deterministic or oriented stochastic processes in the assembly of anuran communities
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