Consequences of swamp forest fragmentation on assemblages of vascular epiphytes and climbing plants: evaluation of the metacommunity structure

Aim: Habitat reduction in fragmented landscapes provides an opportunity to study the biogeographic patterns that drive changes in diversity in poorly studied metacommunities. In this study, colonization-extinction dynamics were indirectly evaluated through the analysis of the species-area relationship and the nestedness of vascular epiphytes and climbing plants in 30 swamp forest fragments.
Location: Coast of the Araucanía Region in Chile.
Taxon: Vascular epiphytes (16 species, mainly Pteridophytes) and climbing plants (15 species).
Methods: We used the database in Pincheira-Ulbrich et al. (2016), where 904 trees were sampled and a total abundance of 41,097 fern fronds and 3,098 climbing stems were reported. For the species-area relationship, a simple linear regression model (SLR) and two models that consider the spatial autocorrelation of species richness among fragments, generalized least squares (GLS) and simultaneous autoregressive model (SAR), were compared. For the species nest...