Briófitas em um fragmento de floresta seca no nordeste do Brasil: Florística, distribuição e filtragem de habitat

Abstract

Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests are shaped by climatic seasonality being considered, in the northeast Brazil, transition areas between the arboreal shrub Caatinga and the coastal Atlantic rainforest. In order to increase knowledge about the predictors that influence the structure of the bryophyte floristic in a fragment of the seasonally dry tropical forest, the present study was divided in two chapters: the first one to inventory the bryophyte species in this fragment of FTSS; and the second sought to contribute to the knowledge of the influence of the arboreal component on the distribution, composition and structure of the bryophyte community in the same fragment. For the first chapter 37 species were recorded, 19 mosses and 18 hepatic, distributed in 14 families, with 11 new records for the state of Paraíba and one for the northeast region of the country; the community presented a diversity of adaptive traits and life forms that allow them to survive the dry season, with species frequently found in Caatinga vegetation. For the second chapter 18 species of epiphytic mosses were recorded in ten families. The tree community is distributed in order to form two distinct groups according to soil texture and epiphytic mosses follow the same pattern of distribution, influenced mainly by the leaf deciduousness of the tree component and roughness of the trunk, with group 1 showing species with adaptive characteristics more desiccation tolerant and group 2, mosses with marked asexual reproduction. Because they have a marked dependence on the immediate environment and are susceptible to loss of biodiversity due to global warming, floristic and ecological knowledge are relevant for understanding communities that live in a transitional environment and that suffer from seasonality and can become a model of how environmental changes can influence the structure and distribution of the bryoflora.