Riqueza, história evolutiva e atributos funcionais: relações entre os padrões geográficos da diversidade de aves na Caatinga

Abstract

The biological diversity can be divided into at least three distinct and complementary types, which include taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity. In addition, analyzing communities from a local perspective (alpha component) and among communities (beta component) generate more information on how diversity is distributed geographically. In recent years, the relationship between spatial patterns of diversity has occupied the attention of ecologists, especially to understand how these components change locally and geographically. We aim to describe the geographic richness patterns, evolutionary history, phylogenetic and functional diversity of birds in the Caatinga dry forest, including the alpha and beta components of diversity. For this, we selected 405 bird species from distributions from BirdLife, their phylogenetic information from the online BirdTree database, and the functional data from EltonTrait 1.0. Grain scale (1, 0.5 and 0.25) and phylogenetic topologies do not change the results. Contrary to expectations, species richness does not correlate with other forms of diversity. The phylogenetic mean diversity in the alpha component correlated with evolutionary history (r = 0.5) and with functional mean diversity (r = 0.66). In the beta component, the mean phylogenetic diversity is correlated with the functional mean diversity (r = 0.57), as well as the turnover of species with phylogenetic turnover (r = 0.8). The diversity of birds presents a high heterogeneity in their geographical distribution. Probably, this pattern should be highly influenced by climatic and topographical heterogeneity. In general, alpha evolutionary distinctiveness appears to be a good predictor for other diversities and is a result that can support spatial prioritization for bird conservation in the Caatinga.