Assessing the completeness of inventories of vascular epiphytes and climbing plants in Chilean swamp forest remnants

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

“…The species richness and floristic composition of climbing plants and vascular epiphytes were obtained from Pincheira‐Ulbrich et al. (). In this research, 30 fragments of swamp forest were sampled (Figure ) and the number of fronds and stems were, respectively, used as abundance measures.…”

“…The study of Pincheira-Ulbrich et al (2016) was essential for this research since it provided complete inventories at the metacommunity scale for both assemblages. This is strongly recommended to perform biogeographic studies of this type (Domínguez et al, 2012;Hortal et al, 2007;Rivera-Huntiel et al, 2012).…”

“…We used both the presence-absence (0-1) and quantitative data sets. The quantitative data corresponded to the average abundance of the species per tree in a given fragment (e.g., number of fronds and stems per tree, respectively, observed in the total quadrants of a fragment; see Pincheira-Ulbrich et al (2016) and Supporting Information Appendix S1). Both types of matrices were constructed with the species in the rows and the forest fragments in the columns.…”

“…This forest is highly fragmented and grows exclusively on flat land within a biogeographic area limited by the Coastal Mountain Range (Peña‐Cortés et al., ). This “archipelago” of secondary forest patches can be assimilated to a source–sink model, since the fragmentation gradient and isolation tend to increase from large fragments of 936 ha (“mainland”) with a maximum separation distances among patches of 60 km (Peña‐Cortés et al., ; Pincheira‐Ulbrich, Hernández, Saldaña, Peña‐Cortés, and Aguilera‐Benavente, ).…”

“…This forest is highly In this study, we evaluated the species-area relationship and the nestedness of the species composition of vascular epiphytes and climbing plants in fragments of swamp forest in the Araucanía Region. Based on previous evidence from other fragmented habitats (e.g., Echeverría et al, 2007;Pincheira-Ulbrich, Rau, & Peña-Cortés, 2009;Pincheira-Ulbrich, Rau, & Smith-Ramírez, 2012;Pincheira-Ulbrich et al, 2016), we hypothesized that (a) the fragment size would be positively related to the species richness; (b) both, the size and isolation of the fragments would explain the assemblage pattern of the metacommunity within the landscape (see Bartels & Chen, 2012;Schnitzer & Bongers, 2002); and (c) given that vascular epiphytes and climbing plants constitute clearly distinguishable functional groups (Bartels & Chen, 2012;Schnitzer & Bongers, 2002), both patterns (species-area relationship and nestedness) would be more marked in epiphytes than in climbers (see Mohandass et al, 2014;Pincheira-Ulbrich et al, 2016;Taylor et al, 2016). One of the mechanisms that could explain this pattern is a metacommunity source-sink dynamic (Leibold et al, 2004), based on the fact that the smaller forest fragments are located in an agroforestry matrix, with a gradient (north-southwest) from higher to lower anthropic use (see the maps in Peña-Cortés et al, 2011).…”