Geographic distance and environmental variation drive community structure of woody plants in Neotropical seasonally dry forest fragments in the Colombian Caribbean

ABSTRACT

Background

Montes de María is the best-preserved tropical dry forest fragment in the Colombian Caribbean, making it a good model to relate environmental and geographic factors to woody plant community structure.

Aims

We related alpha and beta diversity of woody plant communities to geographic distance and bioclimatic factors to understand the underlying factors of community structure.

Methods

We compared species composition among seven sites and calculated alpha (using effective numbers of species) and beta diversity using Whitaker and Bray–Curtis dissimilarity index. Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) and a Mantel test were used to quantify how community structure was related to environmental and/or geographic distance.

Results

We found that Montes de María is as diverse as other dry forest fragments in Colombia. We detected three groups of communities which were shaped mainly by turnover associated with both precipitation and geographic distance.

Conclusions

The high beta diversity of the dry forest of Montes de María is related to a mixture of environmental variation and geographic distance.

KEYWORDS:

• Alpha diversity
• beta diversity
• community assembly
• effective number
• environment
• geographic distance
• turnover

Acknowledgements

We thank the Group of Evolución y Sistematica Tropical of the Universidade de Sucre for their support in the development of the transects and the reviewers and editors for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the ‘División de investigaciones, Universidad de Sucre (DIUS)’, through the project ‘Análisis florístico y fitogeográfico de fragmentos de bosque seco tropical en montes de María (Sucre, Colombia)’