Estratégias ecológicas de plantas em florestas estacionais e savanas do cerrado

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Leandro Maracahipes dos
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/7358
• topic: Peferência de habitats; Plasticidade fenotípica; Gradiente edáfico; Estratégia aquisitiva e conservativa; Dano foliar; Distâncias ecológicas e evolutivas; Contexto de vizinhança; Habitat preference; Leaf damage; Phenotypic plasticity; Edaphic gradient,; Acquisitive and conservative strategies; Ecological and evolutionary distances; Neighboring context; CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::ECOLOGIA

The adoption of different ecological strategies is an important factor to determine the establishment and persistence of species in local communities. In general, the Cerrado is characterized by high fire frequency and poor soils. Generally under conditions of low fertility and high fire frequency the filtered species tend to have characteristics that represent adaptations to these environmental stresses. Considering that savanna species evolved under severe environmental filters, our aim was to evaluate how the adoption of different ecological strategies can determine the performance of the functional traits, the structure of the communities, and the relationship between a focal plant and its neighborhood. In this thesis work, which is divided into three chapters, we use three different scales to evaluate how species ecological strategies can determine the performance and establishment in local communities. In the first chapter, which is based on habitat scale, we evaluated how ecological strategies of generalist and specialist species of seasonal forest and savannas are fundamental for the establishment and persistence of the species in these habitats with marked differences in frequency in fire frequency and nutrient availability. In this chapter, we discuss that the different strategies adopted by species are in accordance to the limiting factors of the species occurrence in each of these environments. In the second chapter, which is based on community scale, we seek to understand how environmental gradients can determine different ecological strategies related to functional traits and density of individuals. We showed that the changes in trait values and density of individuals were more evident in the fertility gradient than toxicity, and that seasonal forest communities were more sensitive to changes savanna communities in both gradients. We also observed that species with conservative traits were associated with poor soils and species with acquisitive traits with more fertile soils. In the third chapter, which was developed at the individual scale, we discussed whether the characteristics and phylogenetic relationship of the neighboring plants influence leaf damage in trees and shrubs of savannas. In this chapter, we showed that the ecological and evolutionary distance between individual plants and neighboring plants does not determine the level of leaf damage by herbivores. We discussed that the dominance of generalist herbivores, co-evolution between plants and specialist herbivores, and preferential consumption of young leaves may be more important to determine the level of leaf damage than the neighboring context in which a given plant is inserted.