Diversity high up: a cloud forest of the Serra da Mantiqueira as a vascular epiphyte hotspot

Abstract

The diversity of montane environments is dictated by a variety of environmental conditions. Parque Estadual do Ibitipoca is located in the Serra da Mantiqueira, between ~1,000-1,800 m, and harbors approximately 300 ha of cloud forests. The composition of vascular epiphytes was determined by analyzing data from expeditions conducted between July 2014 and July 2015, and specimens deposited at herbaria. The 224 species were distributed into 82 genera of which Pleurothallis s.l. was the richest (13 spp.) and 23 families of which Orchidaceae was the richest (87 spp.). This richness corresponds to approximately 9.5% of the vascular epiphytic flora of the Atlantic Forest concentrated in an area that comprises 0.00085% of this phytogeographic domain, which represents one of the largest diversities ever sampled in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. This fact is more relevant given that 13 species are threatened at the country level and 23 at the state level.

Vascular epiphytes of the Serra do Relógio: the surprising richness of the seasonal forests in the mountains of Minas Gerais, Southeastern Brazil

“…The altitude can justify these results, whereas that richest areas in vascular epiphytes have been recorded in elevations between 1,000 and 2,000 m in several studies (Madison 1977;Gentry & Dodson 1987;Benzing 1990;Küper et al 2004;Krömer et al 2005; The richest families are according to the patterns found in the Neotropical Region (NR) (Mendieta-Leiva et al 2020) and the Atlantic Forest (AF) (Ramos et al 2019), in which Orchidaceae and Bromeliaceae are the richest. Polypodiaceae is the third richest family and often occupy such rank in small scales, although Araceae, the third in AF and NR, is the fourth richest family in the SR (Hietz & Hietz-Seifert 1995;Wolf & Alejandro 2003;Obermüller et al 2012;Marcusso & Monteiro 2016;Furtado & Menini Neto 2018a;Araújo et al 2019;Barbosa et al 2019), which was corroborated in the present study. These four families together represent 70% of the recorded species in the SR.…”

“…Studies on vascular epiphytes in Minas Gerais have intensified in the last decade and have been performed in several types of vegetations such as urban green areas (Alvim et al 2020;Kaeser et al 2020), urban forests (Furtado & Menini Neto 2015a;Santana et al 2017;Martins et al 2020), Cerrado sensu stricto , ombrophilous forests (Alves & Menini Neto 2014;Furtado & Menini Neto 2015b, 2018a and seasonal semi-deciduous forests (Barbosa et al 2015(Barbosa et al , 2019Basílio et al 2015). It is worth mentioning that the last vegetation type presented higher richness of vascular epiphytes in the Atlantic Forest (Zona da Mata) of Minas Gerais than in any other Brazilian states in the same type of phytophysionomy (Barbosa et al 2015(Barbosa et al , 2019.…”

Epífitas vasculares da Serra de Baturité, Ceará, Nordeste do Brasil

“…In Brazil, H. parasitica Jacq. was reported by Leitman et al (2014) and Furtado and Menini-Neto (2018) with epiphytic habit for the states of Bahia and Minas Gerais, respectively.…”

“…According to Mania and Monteiro (2010), the high number of epiphytes in more humid locations is due to high rainfall, which provides conditions that favor the development of these species. The availability of water as a limiting factor in the development of epiphytes is also mentioned in the studies Furtado and Menini-Neto (2018) and Marcusso et al (2019). These municipalities often present annual rainfall averages exceeding 1,500 mm (PDITS, 2014).…”

“…The first study about the epiphytic community in the Brazilian territory was restricted to the Serra do Mar in Paraná (Hertel, 1949). Since then, most studies about the floristic composition and/or structure of vascular epiphytes in Brazilian forests have been concentrated in the Southeast (Fontoura et al, 1997;Dislich and Mantovani, 1998;Mania and Monteiro, 2010;Furtado and Menini-Neto, 2018) and South (Cervi and Borgo, 2007;Dettke et al, 2008). The North region included studies mainly with representatives of the families Bromeliaceae and Orchidaceae (Koch et al, 2013;Santos Júnior and Jardim, 2017;Brito et al, 2019) In the Northeast, only four studies focusing on epiphytes have been developed; one in Rio Grande do Norte (Oliveira et al, 2012), another in Paraíba state (Dias-Terceiro et al, 2014), one in Bahia (Leitman et al, 2014) and on Sergipe (Araújo et al, 2019).…”