Assembly structures of coastal woody species of eastern South America: Patterns and drivers.

ABSTRACT: Tropical regions have provided new insights into how ecological communities are assembled. In dry coastal communities, water stress has been hypothesized to determine plant assembly structure by favoring preadapted lineages from neighboring ecosystems, consistent with functional clustering. However, it is unclear whether this hypothesis is sufficient to explain how coastal communities in tropical ecosystems are assembled. Here, we test whether water stress or other factors drive community assembly in woody plant communities across the coastal zone of Brazil, a tropical ecosystem. We characterized functional and phylogenetic structures of these communities and determined the underlying environmental factors (e.g., water stress, historical climate stability, edaphic constraints, and habitat

SUBMITTER: Oliveira EVDS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11403147 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature