We assessed the roles of historical and recent factors on the structure of a Neotropical lizard community from Serra da Capivara, in the semiarid Caatinga of north-eastern Brazil. We found no phylogenetic structure in community composition. Spatial niche overlap was high for most species pairwise comparisons. Null model analyses indicated that mean spatial and trophic niche overlaps did not differ, while mean morphological niche overlap was significantly lower than expected by chance, indicating a community structured along the morphological niche axis but not along the trophic nor spatial niche axes. We suggest that the lack of spatial niche segregation and species association may be related to current environmental conditions, such as habitat homogeneity and climatic variables. Morphological and dietary niches were influenced by historical factors, with phylogeny accounting for most of the variation in our data. Most of the variation is accounted for by the divergence of basal lineages (Gekkota/Scincomorpha/Iguania). These segregations influence behaviour and foraging modes of the given clades. Finally, these results are quite like those found for lizard communities in Seasonal Tropical Dry Forests (STDFs) and Cerrado savannahs, which can be a starting point to discuss the relationship between these formations to Caatinga domain.

我们评估了历史和近期因素对巴西东北部半干旱卡廷加卡皮瓦拉山脉新热带蜥蜴群落结构的作用。我们没有发现群落组成中的系统发育结构。对于大多数物种的成对比较来说，空间生态位重叠度很高。零模型分析表明，平均空间和营养生态位重叠没有差异，而平均形态生态位重叠显着低于偶然预期，表明群落沿形态生态位轴结构，但不沿营养或空间生态位轴结构。我们认为，空间生态位隔离和物种关联的缺乏可能与当前的环境条件有关，例如栖息地同质性和气候变量。形态和饮食生态位受到历史因素的影响，系统发育解释了我们数据中的大部分变化。大多数变异是由基础谱系（Gekkota/Scincomorpha/Iguania）的分歧造成的。这些分离影响给定分支的行为和觅食模式。最后，这些结果与在季节性热带干燥森林（STDF）和塞拉多稀树草原中发现的蜥蜴群落非常相似，这可以作为讨论这些地层与卡廷加域之间关系的起点。