Lluvia de semillas y establecimiento de plántulas en un fragmento de bosque de planicie costera

Abstract

The present study has the objective of describing the rain of seeds and the community of seedlings established inside a fragment of Tall wet Restinga forest, also analyze the temporal variation of the diversity of species for the community of seedlings within fragment; and besides evaluate the degree of similarity of the composition of species in the seed rain and the composition of established seedling species. For this, 120 subplots of seedlings were installed inside the forest patch, they were monitored every six months for two years and 120 seed traps were monitored for 3 years. In both stages of life, the identification of species was made through the collection of seeds and botanical specimens and its subsequent analysis in the laboratory. Seedling diversity was measured using the Shannon index transformed to the effective number of species; the temporal changes of seedling diversity were estimated by the Jaccard and Bray Curtis coefficients, applied to the combinations C1-C2, C1-C3 and C1-C4; the degree of similarity of the composition of established seedling species and seed rain composition was evaluated using the Jaccard coefficient. The diversity of seedlings ranges between 2 - 6.5 effective species / plot in 50% of cases, it had a wide dispersion of data in each census. The temporal variation of the diversity of seedlings between censuses showed a greater degree of dissimilarity between among the combinations C1-C2 and C1-C3, while the combination C1-C4 revealed greater similarity in terms of diversity. The analysis of similarity between the composition of seedling species versus seed species, found a low proportion of shared species and therefore a low degree of similarity between the two stages of life, high abundance of seed of species described as pioneers that are not present in the seedling bank.