Variação nas diversidades funcional e filogenética em comunidades de pequenos mamíferos da Mata Atlântica

Abstract

The increasing destruction of the Atlantic Forest is considered the most important cause of the decline in mammal biodiversity. Due to their importance for the ecosystem functioning, it is necessary to understand the response range of mammals to the landscape structure. The insertion of functional and phylogenetic information is one of the greatest contributions to the study of communities. This study is a result of the growing concern about the future of biodiversity, as the increasing in the variation in functional diversity (FD) and phylogenetic diversity (PD) of the community, the resource availability and the efficiency with which resources are used in an ecosystem also increases. This way, I structured this thesis in two chapters. In the first chapter, I reviewed FD publications using mammals as a study case to improve the scope of its functional approach. I selected 215 articles, but only 24 had mammals as focus. I observed that, despite the fast growth of progress in functional ecology, mammalian studies are advancing vaguely. In the second chapter, I assessed the differences in the FD and PD of small mammal communities in areas with diverging ecological characteristics of the Atlantic Forest, taking into account factors such as island / continent and degree of conservation of the area. I used the data from LEMA / UERJ (PARNASO) and Labvert / UFRJ (PEIG) databases between the years 2013 and 2018. The FD values were positively related to the degree of recovery and the recovery time of the forest. PD indices and metrics used responded in different ways, and it was not possible to observe a clear pattern in the phylogeny-based community structure. Even with the current advances in functional ecology, the choice of traits and the data availability are still a problem for studies with mammals. A field protocol that specifies the traits that can be used for accessing FD should be proposed for further studies, enabling comparisons among different studies