Floristic survey of Restinga Forests in southern Bahia reveals the effect of geography on community composition

The Restinga forests of southern Bahia are found over coastal sandy Quaternary sediments. Their flora is poorly known and the present study aimed to assess their floristic composition. We surveyed four sites at Maraú and Itacaré municipalities and identified 302 angiosperm species belonging to 184 genera of 75 families. The species richest families were Fabaceae (35 species), Myrtaceae (25), Rubiaceae (21), Sapotaceae (13), Bromeliaceae (12), Annonaceae (11), Erythroxylaceae (10), Melastomataceae (9), and Apocynaceae (8). Local flora includes elements with distribution restricted to Mata Atlântica domain, disjunct between Amazon and Mata Atlântica domains, and those occupying moist forests and dry vegetation of central Brazil. We also tested the hypothesis that floristic composition of the Restinga forests is influenced by geographically close wet forests through cluster and principal component analyzes with eleven Restinga forest and nine wet forest of Mata Atlântica domain sites. The results support five main groups, most of them include both Restinga forest sites and adjacent wet forests, thus corroborating the hypothesis that geographical proximity to floristic stock of wet forests have great influence in floristic composition of Restinga forests. This is the supplementary material cited on the paper.