Name: Georgea Silva Lyrio
Type: MSc dissertation
Publication date: 05/04/2019
Advisor:
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Sérgio Lucena Mendes | Advisor * |
| Marina Zanin Gregorini | Co-advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Sérgio Lucena Mendes | Advisor * |
| Marina Zanin Gregorini | Co advisor * |
| LUANA D`AVILA CENTODUCATTE | External Alternate * |
| Adriano Garcia Chiarello | External Examiner * |
| Danielle de Oliveira Moreira | Internal Alternate * |
| Leonora Pires Costa | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: Human activities such as agriculture, mining, livestock and wood extraction are identified as the main factors of forest fragmentation of the native vegetation. Fragmentation affects landscape heterogeneity forming patches of different sizes habitat matrix and connectivity among forest fragments, thus affecting biological diversity. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the effects of native vegetation structure and configuration on species diversity and functional diversity of medium and large mammals in a complex system of Atlantic Forest fragments. For this, fragments of native vegetation with different spatial configuration and structural characteristics were selected, which were characterized by patch and landscape measurements delimited by buffers of one, five and ten kilometers. Camera-traps were installed in forest fragments to register focal species. The diversity of medium and large mammals was calculated using two richness estimators, both species and functional. Functional richness is a more complex attribute and infers on the amount of functional space occupied by a community of species, which was calculated by FRIC (Functional Richness) and FD (Functional diversity) indexes. Linear models were used to determine the influence of native vegetation structure and configuration, represented by Principal Component Analysis and spatial filter on the diversity of medium and large mammals. The corrected Akaike Information Criterion was used to select the best model among all possible combinations, but none of the presented models had the ability to explain the variation of species richness in forest fragments. However, two models appeared as complementary explanations for beta diversity, in which native vegetation fragmentation positively influenced the increase in beta diversity of the study region. The results indicate that the heterogeneous landscape of the study region consists mainly of habitat generalists species of medium and large mammals.
Key words: landscape ecology, functional diversity, functional richness, fragmentation, beta diversity
