Diversity patterns, ecological associations and future of research on Costa Rican myxomycetes

Abstract

The most active research period on myxomycetes in Costa Rica has taken place in the last three decades. During this time, most of the collections have been carried out and most of the scientific articles have been produced. However, the lack of standard protocols and systematic planning across the country generated a need to conduct an analysis of myxomycete records to define future lines of work. A compilation, cleaning, standardisation and analysis of information associated with a database of more than 7800 records that comprised 242 species of myxomycetes reported in Costa Rica during the last 110 years, was carried out. An interpretation of data with a conservation approach that integrated elements of data-mining and geographical information systems was conducted. Results showed that myxomycetes has been comparatively well studied in Costa Rica in relation to other regional or tropical countries. However, survey effort has been unequal within the territory, leaving some interesting areas or substrates understudied. The absence of long-term goals to study this country and Mesoamerica has limited the potential that the analysed data can have within the context of conservation. This could be the next logical step in the study of this group of microorganisms in that country.

Comparative analysis on datasets of myxomycetes associated with boreal, temperate and tropical regions of North America

“…Similarly, a correlation between the number of records and the number of species was carried out to test the hypothesis that the relationship between the two variables is independent of location. With the use of 25 datasets of myxomycete records from North America (obtained from Lado & Rojas [2018] and Stephenson et al [2020]), a general model was created to assess the last idea in a broader context and to evaluate the position of the three studied datasets in relation with the general trend of species accumulation.…”

“…It is clear that the length of the season with such conditions (i.e., non-winter months) follows the pattern DNP<GSMNP<LSBS and that myxomycetes enter the stage of formation of reproductive structures during that time. As such, and as many myxomycete researchers would know, the accumulation of new species using field methods is slower in tropical areas (see Novozhilov et al [2017a] for Vietnam, Lado & Rojas [2018] for Costa Rica), which can partially be attributed to the extremely long (comparatively) season with favorable conditions. In these areas, there are always fruiting bodies of myxomycetes in the field, but very often they tend to represent a core of extremely common species.…”

Myxomycetes collected in the eastern United States and patterns of relative biodiversity

“…A rarefaction curve was constructed using the relationship between the number of records and the accumulated number of species to observe the potential contribution of doubling the collecting effort. Also, a Hill number-based diversity profile was created to compare the studied dataset with published results from Costa Rica (Lado and Rojas 2018 ). This type of profile is useful to visually assess some characteristics of a biological community such as species richness and evenness/dominance in one figure (the axis y is multiscale, but it is referred to as “diversity”) and can also be used to display survey completeness at the different q values.…”

“…the Neotropics, see Lado and Wrigley de Basanta 2008 ), but analyses have relied on the literature and may have excluded unpublished data from herbaria. One exception to a more integrated approach was recently carried out in Costa Rica (Lado and Rojas 2018 ) but the geographical extent of that country limited the potential extrapolation of the analyses. Unfortunately, for most larger geographical and biological units worldwide, there are not enough myxomycete records for meaningful evaluations.…”