Determinantes da raridade das espécies e seus efeitos sobre a estrutura de comunidades biológicas

• Autor(a) principal: Sgarbi, Luciano Fabris
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/8612
• topic: Raridade; Estrutura de comunidades; Gradientes ambientais; Rarity; Community structure; Environmental gradients; CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::ECOLOGIA

A recurrent pattern seen in nature is that species vary in abundance among sites, being common in a few sites and rare at the majority of sites. This intraspecific distribution of abundance, in turn, generates an excess of rare species in biological communities. This excess may cause problems in data analyses as datasets include many zeros. In this thesis I studied the causes of species rarity and how the excess of rare species influence the detection of patterns at the community level. In the first chapter I observed that species classified as rare were common in other habitat types, in other sites elsewhere, and in other years. However, among these three factors, the rarity was explained mainly by the habitat type. In the second chapter I observed that species tend to become rarer as they distance themselves (above, below or in both directions) from their optimal elevation. This pattern was quite robust and independent of taxonomic group or geographic region. In the third chapter, I observed that remotion of rare species in general did not have effects on the recovery of community structure patterns. In addition, the effect of that remotion of rare species was similar to that observed for the common species exclusion or random species exclusion.