Author(s): Solar, Ricardo Ribeiro de Castro ; Barlow, Jos ; Ferreira, Joice ; Berenguer, Erika ; Lees, Alexander C. ; Thomson, James R. ; Louzada, Júlio ; Maués, Márcia ; Moura, Nárgila G. ; Oliveira, Victor H. F. ; Chaul, Júlio C. M. ; Schoereder, José Henrique ; Vieira, Ima Célia Guimarães ; Nally, Ralph Mac ; Gardner, Toby A.
Date: 2018
Origin: Oasisbr
Subject(s): Amazon forest; Diversity partitioning; Land-cover change; Landscape divergence; Multi-taxa; Nestedness; Turnover
Land-cover change and ecosystem degradation may lead to biotic homogenization, yet our under- standing of this phenomenon over large spatial scales and different biotic groups remains weak. We used a multi-taxa dataset from 335 sites and 36 heterogeneous landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon to examine the potential for landscape-scale processes to modulate the cumulative effects of local disturbances. Biotic homogenization was high in production areas but much less in disturbed and regenerating forests, where high levels of among-site and among-landscape b-diversity appeared to attenuate species loss at larger scales. We found consistently high levels of b-diversity among landscapes for all land cover classes, providing support for landscape-scale divergence in species composition. Our findings support concerns that b-diversity has been underestimated as a driver of biodiversity change and underscore the importance of maintaining a distributed network of reserves, including remaining areas of undisturbed primary forest, but also disturbed and regenerating forests, to conserve regional biota.
