Uso de diferentes abordagens filogenéticas na compreensão da montagem das florestas tropicais atlânticas

Abstract

Tropical forests are complex natural communities because they are a collection of species that coexist in space and time, interacting with each other (species-species) and with the environment (species-environment). These forests are the result of current and past ecological processes and mechanisms that influence the distribution of species and the composition and functioning of communities. Given this complexity, the evolutionary history of species has proven to be a fruitful approach to improve the understanding of these natural communities. Thus, this thesis aimed to understand the assembly of tree communities in a tropical forest gradient by means of phylogenetic relatedness approaches among tree species. The approaches used to understand tropical forest assembly verified taxonomic and phylogenetic turnover among forest sites, the role of taxonomic and environmental identity, and the presence of phylogenetic fingerprint in the expression of carbon uptake and storage in tropical forests. For this purpose, permanent plot inventory data available in the ForestPlots.net system were used, and between 14 and 30 tropical forest sites were selected (totaling between 10.4 and 33.8 ha of sampling). The environmental variables used were the chemical and textural attributes of the soils and the climatic data related to precipitation and air temperature. In the tropical forests analyzed, spatial distance via environment showed a weak indirect effect on taxonomic and phylogenetic dissimilarity. In these forests, turnover among communities was driven by the direct effects of mechanisms related to neutral, niche and historical processes. Carbon storage and uptake in the tropical forests analyzed were influenced by taxonomic identity, with environment playing a secondary and indirect role. Furthermore, carbon storage and uptake did not show a phylogenetic fingerprint among related genera (absence of phylogenetic signal), indicating that these genera have distinct strategies in carbon storage and uptake.