The Brazilian freshwater wetscape: Changes in tree community diversity and composition on climatic and geographic gradients.

Wetlands harbor an important compliment of regional plant diversity, but in many regions data on wetland diversity and composition is still lacking, thus hindering our understanding of the processes that control it. While patterns of broad-scale terrestrial diversity and composition typically correlate with contemporary climate it is not clear to what extent patterns in wetlands are complimentary, or conflicting. To elucidate this, we consolidate data from wetland forest inventories in Brazil and examine patterns of diversity and composition along temperature and rainfall gradients spanning five biomes. We collated 196 floristic inventories covering an area >220 ha and including >260,000 woody individuals. We detected a total of 2,453 tree species, with the Amazon alone accounting for nearly half. Compositional patterns indicated differences in freshwater wetland floras among Brazilian biomes, although biomes with drier, more seasonal climates tended to have a larger proportion of more widely distributed species. Maximal alpha diversity increased with annual temperature, rainfall, and decreasing seasonality, patterns broadly consistent with upland vegetation communities. However, alpha diversity-climate relationships were only revealed at higher diversity values associated with the uppermost quantiles, and in most sites diversity varied irrespective of climate. Likewise, mean biome-level differences in alpha-diversity were unexpectedly modest, even in comparisons of savanna-area wetlands to those of nearby forested regions. We describe attenuated wetland climate-diversity relationships as a shifting balance of local and regional effects on species recruitment. Locally, excessive waterlogging strongly filters species able to colonize from regional pools. On the other hand, increased water availability can accommodate a rich community of drought-sensitive immigrant species that are able to track buffered wetland microclimates. We argue that environmental conditions in many wetlands are not homogeneous with respect to regional climate, and that responses of wetland tree communities to future climate change may lag behind that of non-wetland, terrestrial habitat.

Plant reproduction in the Central Amazonian floodplains: challenges and adaptations.

BACKGROUND: The Central Amazonian floodplain forests are subjected to extended periods of flooding and to flooding amplitudes of 10 m or more. The predictability, the length of the flood pulse, the abrupt transition in the environmental conditions along topographic gradients on the banks of major rivers in Central Amazonia, and the powerful water and sediment dynamics impose a strong selective pressure on plant reproduction systems. SCOPE: In this review, we examine how the hydrological cycle influences the strategies of sexual and asexual reproduction in herbaceous and woody plants. These are of fundamental importance for the completion of the life cycle. Possible constraints to seed germination, seedling establishment and formation of seed banks are also covered. Likewise, we also discuss the importance of river connectivity for species propagation and persistence in floodplains. CONCLUSIONS: The propagation and establishment strategies employed by the highly diversified assortment of different plant life forms result in contrasting successional stages and a zonation of plant assemblages along the flood-level gradient, whose species composition and successional status are continuously changing not only temporally but also spatially along the river channel.