Elsevier

Aquatic Botany

Volume 167, October 2020, 103295
Aquatic Botany

Plant community composition patterns in relation to microtopography and distance to water bodies in a tropical forested wetland

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aquabot.2020.103295Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Plant community composition responded to microtopography heterogeneity and distance to the lagoon’s edge.

  • Conversely, structural and diversity attributes did not.

  • Rhizophora mangle had higher abundance in plots with homogeneous microtopography.

  • Terminalia buceras and Chrysobalanus icaco had higher abundance in plots far from the lagoon’s edge.

  • R. mangle and T. buceras abundance, the two most abundant species, were negatively correlated.

Abstract

Understanding the spatial variation of a plant community’s composition in response to key environmental variables is a fundamental task to identify and promote better conservation strategies. In forested wetlands, hydrological regimes have been identified as crucial factors that shape the community’s attributes and composition patterns. Therefore, the objective of this study was to analyze the response of a tropical forested wetland diversity and structural attributes, as well as its species composition to two types of environmental proxies related to flooding and salinity regimes: microtopography and distance to water bodies. The forest was characterized by sampling all the individuals with DBH ≥ 10 cm found inside twenty-five 25 × 50 m plots. Each plot’s microtopographic variables and distance to water bodies were extracted using a LiDAR point cloud. The response of the community’s attributes to the quantified environmental proxies was analyzed using an RDA ordination. Community composition was the only attribute where the ordination was significant, particularly only its first axis. Additional analysis showed that Rhizophora mangle was gradually substituted by Terminalia buceras as the most abundant species along the RDA first axis. This first axis was significantly correlated with two environmental proxies: distance to the lagoon’s edge and standard deviation of ground surface elevation. Moreover, linear regression analysis revealed that the abundance of three species was explained by these environmental proxies. R. mangle abundance showed a negative response to standard deviation of ground surface elevation, while T. buceras and Chrysobalanus icaco showed a positive response to distance to the lagoon’s edge.

Introduction

Tropical Forested Wetlands (TFW) are tree-dominated communities found in tropical latitudes under a brackish or freshwater flooding regime (Ainslie, 2002; Craft, 2016; Duberstein and Krauss, 2016). These forests usually contain a small number of plant species, which have developed adaptations to withstand flooding and sometimes brackish or saline conditions (Alongi, 2002; Novelo and Ramos, 2005; Kauffman et al., 2016). Despite their relatively low richness, TFW provide some crucial ecosystem services such as hosting fish nurseries, providing protection against storms, controlling soil erosion, purifying water and sequestering large amounts of carbon (Donato et al., 2011; Posa et al., 2011; Adame et al., 2013; Alongi, 2014; Lee et al., 2014; Zhu et al., 2017).

An outstanding property of these forests is their high variation in terms of structure and species composition (Craft, 2016; Duberstein and Krauss, 2016). Recognizing and understanding such variation is a crucial task needed to undertake better conservation strategies and management practices. For example, associating the abundance or presence of certain protected species in Mexico (e.g., Rhizophora mangle or Laguncularia racemosa; DOF (Diario Oficial de la Federación, México), 2010\) with particular environmental conditions will not only aid in developing more precise maps of their distribution (e.g., CONABIO, 2015), but also help direct actions to preserve the environmental conditions that support the species populations (Luo et al., 2010). On the other hand, gaining insights into the variation of different forest attributes according to certain environmental factors will help forecast climate change effects over the plant communities or develop better restoration strategies (Erwin, 2009; Lugo et al., 2014; Mukherjee et al., 2014; Osland et al., 2017; Freund et al., 2018; Moomaw et al., 2018). Particularly, the conservation of TFW has been highlighted due to the high amount of carbon sequestered in both above-ground biomass and soil, which can be higher than 1000 Mg C/ha (Posa et al., 2011; Pendleton et al., 2012; Guerra-Santos et al., 2014; Hutchison et al., 2014; Sjögersten et al., 2014; Kauffman et al., 2016).

Previous studies have reported a relation between the variation found in forested wetland’s attributes and certain key environmental factors, namely, waterlogging and saline / freshwater regimes, as well as soil characteristics (Ferreira and Stohlgren, 1999; Souza and Martins, 2005; Krauss et al., 2006; Cortes-Castillo and Rangel-Ch, 2011). In turn, these environmental factors have been related to very small variations in terrain’s altitude (i.e., microtopography; Rheinhardt, 1992; Oliveira-Filho et al., 1994; Scarano et al., 1997; Moser et al., 2007; Duberstein and Conner, 2009; Lampela et al., 2016; Freund et al., 2018) and distance to water bodies (Tomlinson, 1986; Fickert and Grüninger, 2010; Manrow-Villalobos and Vilchez-Alvarado, 2012), as these conditions modify the water fluxes in the ecosystem.

In order to characterize the microtopography of a region, detailed terrain information must be generated; however, this can be a highly time-consuming task. Thus, previous studies have focused on generating broad microtopography variables such as mean ground surface elevation and ground surface elevation range (e.g., Koponen et al., 2004; Souza and Martins, 2005; Teixeira et al., 2008, but see Lampela et al., 2016; Freund et al., 2018). This limitation can be overcome using LiDAR technology, which consists of laser pulses that enable a highly detailed reconstruction of the surface and terrain height models (Detto et al., 2013; Cobb et al., 2017). Therefore, using a LiDAR-derived DEM, microtopographic variables and distance to water bodies can be easily quantified. Previous studies have used this technology to extract similar environmental variables (Detto et al., 2013; Cordell et al., 2017; Giri, 2016).

The goal of this study was to test if the TFW attributes variation responded to two types of hydrological regime proxies: microtopography and distance to water bodies. Our main hypothesis was that TFW structural and diversity attributes, as well as species composition, will vary according to the quantified environmental proxies.

Section snippets

Study area

The study was focused on a highly conserved TFW in the surroundings of El Cometa lagoon inside the Pantanos de Centla Biosphere Reserve, Mexico (18° 28′ 5″ N, 92° 27′ 15″ W, Fig. 1). This reserve is one of the largest wetlands conservation areas in North America, covering more than 300,000 ha (17° 57′ 53″ - 18° 39′ 03″ N and 92° 06′ 39″ - 92° 47′ 58″ W); however, only 8 % of this area is covered by TFW (SEMARNAP - INE, 2000). Annual mean precipitation is 1693 mm, of which the majority falls

Tropical swamp Forest’s structural and diversity attributes

In total, 996 individuals and 13 species were recorded. Nine species were identified up to species level: Chrysobalanus icaco L. (Chrysobalanaceae), Coccoloba barbadensis Jacq. (Polygonaceae), Laguncularia racemosa (L.) Gaertn. (Combretaceae), Lonchocarpus hondurensis Kunth. (Fabaceae), Manilkara zapota (L.) P.Royen (Sapotaceae), Pachira aquatica Aubl. (Malvaceae), R. mangle, Tabebuia rosea (Bertol.) Bertero ex A.DC (Bignoniaceae) and Terminalia buceras (Combretaceae). The remaining four

Discussion

Distance to water bodies and microtopographic variations can interact to give complex combinations of environmental conditions, which in turn, have effects over the TFW community composition, structural and diversity attributes. Previous efforts have documented this relation at different scales (Koponen et al., 2004; Souza and Martins, 2005; Teixeira et al., 2008; Duberstein and Conner, 2009; Teixeira et al., 2011; Duque Estrada et al., 2013; Lampela et al., 2016). Due to the relatively small

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jonathan V. Solórzano: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft. J. Alberto Gallardo-Cruz: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing. Candelario Peralta-Carreta: Methodology, Investigation, Writing - original draft. Rubén Martínez-Camilo: Writing - review & editing. Ana Fernández-Montes de Oca: Investigation, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the people of Ribera baja de San Francisco, Campeche for their hospitality and Nikolay M. Luna, Miguelina Sánchez, Derio A. Jiménez López, Marco A. Domínguez, Rubi E. Muñoz Vázquez, and Jorge E. Navarro Ramos for their help in fieldwork.

Funding

This work was supported by LANRESC (Laboratorio Nacional de Resiliencia Costera)

(Grant No. 271544, 2016) CONACyT-FORDECyT (Grant No. 273646) and Universidad Iberoamericana (División de Investigación Convocatoria 14, Proyecto 0051).

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