Phylogenetic impoverishment of Amazonian tree communities in an experimentally fragmented forest landscape

Amazonian rainforests sustain some of the richest tree communities on Earth, but their ecological and evolutionary responses to human threats remain poorly known. We used one of the largest experimental datasets currently available on tree dynamics in fragmented tropical forests and a recent phyloge...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014, Vol.9 (11), p.e113109-e113109
Main Authors: Santos, Bráulio A, Tabarelli, Marcelo, Melo, Felipe P L, Camargo, José L C, Andrade, Ana, Laurance, Susan G, Laurance, William F
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Angiosperms
Biodiversity
Biology and Life Sciences
Brazil
Carbon sequestration
Carbon storage
Communities
Conservation of Natural Resources
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Ecosystem services
Ecosystems
Extinction, Biological
Forests
Fragmentation
Genera
Genetic Variation
Habitat fragmentation
Human behavior
Landscape
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Plant diversity
Rainforests
Trees
Trees - classification
Tropical forests
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Summary:Amazonian rainforests sustain some of the richest tree communities on Earth, but their ecological and evolutionary responses to human threats remain poorly known. We used one of the largest experimental datasets currently available on tree dynamics in fragmented tropical forests and a recent phylogeny of angiosperms to test whether tree communities have lost phylogenetic diversity since their isolation about two decades previously. Our findings revealed an overall trend toward phylogenetic impoverishment across the experimentally fragmented landscape, irrespective of whether tree communities were in 1-ha, 10-ha, or 100-ha forest fragments, near forest edges, or in continuous forest. The magnitude of the phylogenetic diversity loss was low (
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0113109