Variação de traços funcionais que estruturam comunidades vegetais em restingas

Abstract

Functional trait-based approaches are increasingly used in plant ecology to analyse the environmental filtration observed in environmental gradients. Such analyzes allow a quantification of the functional response of plant communities to changes occurring in a gradient, responding to abiotic and biotic drivers. Evidence suggests that intraspecific variation, due to phenotypic plasticity or genetic diversity and a difference in the composition of the species in question, should play a crucial role in driving the relationship of trait values in community vs. environment. Based on this, this dissertation presents an evaluation of the variation of functional traits of plant species in response to environmental filters in Restingas slopes of the South Coast of Alagoas as well as a contribution of the instraespecific variation and the turnover of the species in the gradient. For this, we measured 11 functional traits in Restinga species along a gradient by transects. We grouped plant species according to zones of gradient (zone a to zone c) and zone d (flood) and compared individual’s traits by ANOVA. Our second analysis partitioned the contributions of species turnover and intraspecific variation to among-site variation in functional traits. Significant differences were found between averages of traits in the zones. Evaluating the influence of species turnover and intraspecific variation on the average of each characteristic found in the zone, a decomposition of the total variation showed that the turnover of the species represents a greater proportion of the total variation of the characteristics in an intraspecific variation. Our results reveal that a community assembly is limited by environmental filters.