Determinantes da estrutura de comunidades de Trichoptera Kirby, 1813 (Insecta) de riachos de cabeceira em múltiplas escalas espaciais

• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira, Juliana Simião
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/7370
• topic: Metacomunidades; Dispersão; Diversidade beta; Partição aditiva; Cobertura vegetal; Uso do solo; Ecossistemas lóticos; Escala hierárquica; Metacommunity; Dispersion; Beta diversity; Addictive partition; Vegetation cover; Land use; Lotic ecosystems; Hierarchical scale; CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::ECOLOGIA

Headwater streams biodiversity is very important to the maintenance of the biological integrity found in the whole hydrological basin. Therefore, understanding the processes generating and/or influencing biodiversity in such environments may contribute to future aquatic integrity monitoring programs and to the strategic planning for both species and community conservation found within the every stream networks. The main goals of the current study were to: i) identify landscape and spatial environmental predictors responsible for the structure of aquatic insects communities (Trichoptera); ii) identify which hierarchical scale within the hydrologic basins is responsible for the highest biodiversity variation, what may provide subsidies for future studies and planned conservation of lotic environments. In order to achieve such goals, we did different studies with specific objectives directed to (i) measure the contribution of environmental and spatial variables while determining species richness and composition within Trichoptera communities, separately considering species with wide and narrow spatial distribution; (ii) measure the influence of landscape attributes such as vegetation cover in different spatial scales on species richness and bet diversity, as well on the different trophic functional groups found within the Trichoptera community; (iii) evaluate the effects of nested headwater streams community structure embedded within superior hierarchical levels (e.g. microbasins, subbasins, and the whole catchment), as well as the effects of the environmental and spatial predictors on alpha, beta and gamaTrichoptera diversity considering different spatial scales. All studies were performed with a set of biological data sampled in 48 headwater streams within two hydrographic basins locate within the state of Goiás, Brazil, with different land use regimes. Within those streams, local environmental variables (physical-chemical variables and habtat integrity), landscape attributes (vegetation cover, and land use classification), and also the biological data regarding the Trichoptera insects were sampled. In the first study, we observed that compositional changes within the Trichoptera communities was determined by local processes, especially for genus with wider distribution, while the communities of those species with narrower distribution were probably structured by other factors not measured here. This study reinforces that the use of community deconstruction related to specific species attributes (e.g. spatial distribution) contributes to a better comprehension of the processes determining the metacommunities structure. In the second study, we verified that landscape attributes within the hydrologic basin, such as vegetation quality around the streamlet and vegetation cover up to 200m from the streamlet, are important predictors to the structure and functioning of Trichoptera communities. In the third study, results indicate that the variation in alpha, beta and gama diversities depend on the spatial scale considered and that the environmental degradation affects distinctly such patterns. We were able to verify that the structure of Trichoptera communities is determined by environmental factors, mainly in the local scales, such as water physical-chemical parameters and vegetation cover. Additionally, we observed that that the spatial scale within which the diversity is maximized is on catchment scale, reinforcing the need to increase the spatial scales considered in such studies in order to obtain a higher diversity for the Trichoptera in headwater streams. Finally, these studies confirm the vulnerability of Trichoptera communities to the variability on water quality and landscape changes, supporting the use of these organisms as indicators and reinforcing the need of conservation strategies which consider the aquatic diversity within each streamlet embedded in hydrologic basin elsewhere.