Environmental and spatial influences on stream zooplankton communities of the Brazilian Cerrado

Gomes, Leonardo Fernandes and Barbosa, Júlia Curraladas and de Oliveira Barbosa, Hugo and Vieira, Maisa Carvalho and Vieira, Ludgero Cardoso Galli (2020) Environmental and spatial influences on stream zooplankton communities of the Brazilian Cerrado. Community Ecology, 21 (1). pp. 25-31. ISSN 1585-8553

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Abstract

The integration of species dispersal dynamics with environmental predictors has become indispensable to understanding the pattern of communities’ organization. Thus, we evaluated the relative importance of environmental and spatial variables on the structure of zooplankton metacommunities in 20 Brazilian Cerrado streams. In multivariate models, we used the Partial Redundancy Analysis and found that space is mostly responsible for determining the structuring of the zooplankton com- munity. However, the environmental predictors did not present a significant explanation. Our results indicate that space might act as a co-variable that explains and filters spatial variation when tested between species distributions and environmental factors. We understand that metacommunity studies with stream zooplankton demand more attention because space explained only a minor part of the variation of the zooplankton community. Therefore, advances in the research for environmental vari- ables that can predict zooplankton in the Cerrado streams are important to understand the effects of anthropogenic change on aquatic communities.

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