Mecanismos que explicam os padrões de diversidade de plantas trepadeiras ao longo de distintas escalas geográficas

Abstract

Climbing plants are a functional group that rely on other plants for physical support, as they do not invest in the production of tissues that provide mechanical support to your body. However, they remain rooted in the ground during their whole lifespan. They are considered one of the most typical plant functional group in tropical forests, where they present their peak of abundance. Climbing plants participate in important processes and dynamics in tropical forests, such as influencing the mortality rate of trees, contributing with nutrients cicling, providing died biomass to litter decomposers. Given the importance of this functional group to the functioning of tropical forests and environmental services, there is a need for research on how climbing plants communities are structured, focusing, if possible, on more than one aspect of biological diversity. This work was a comprehensive effort to fill some gaps in ecological knowledge regarding the community structure of climbing plants. This endeavor corresponded an investigation of topics about community structure from the global scale to the local scale. We review the current explanation for the global pattern of lianas abundance, demonstrating some empirical evidence that conterposes the current explanation. In addition, we elaborate an alternative explanation, based on a multifunctional approach and on the growth strategy typical of climbing plants. We investigate how climatic and spatial factors can influence the community structure of climbing plants in terms of taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity. We detected an alternation of preponderance between the two processes according to the type of diversity investigated. At the local scale, we investigated how the altitudinal variation could influence the assembly of liana communities, focusing on the functional aspects of the community. We verified the influence of altitude on the functional characteristics of the community. We incorporated in our approach the intraspecific variation of functional characteristics (ITV). We showed how the inclusion of ITV allowed to detail and clarify important aspects of the assembly of plant communities. Furthermore, at the local scale, we performed another study focusing on answering questions about how the environmental gradient associated with a geographic variation affects the pattern and phylogenetic structure of trees and lianas. We verified that trees and lianas have differences on the predominance of the process responsible for structuring the community in phylogenetic terms. We argued that these differences were due to the differences in colonization strategies between these functional groups. Finally, we highlight that the findings of these studies provide information on the understanding how plant communities are structured at different geographic scales.