Estrutura e diversidade das assembléias de plantas aquáticas em reservatório do semiárido do Brasil

Abstract

The flood pulse concept focuses on changes caused by rising water level on the biota. For this concept, flooding causes the formation of mosaics in biota with dynamic spatial and temporal own. However, it appears that during the high water level there is an increasing in similarity among the mosaics. Moreover, different environmental factors are identified as the most diversity indices related to the biota of floodplains. Based on the flood pulse concept, during the high water level of a reservoir, we assume that the spatial distance between sites is an important factor for the highest similarity between biological assemblies of aquatic plants and diversity indices of these assemblies are more associated with physical factors such as depth and distance from the dam. The objective of this study was to analyze the structure and diversity of aquatic plants assemblies in a reservoir in the semiarid region of Brazil. Data collection occurred in May 2011, where 10 sites were marked on the reservoir. In these sites, aquatic plants were sampled by the point method, which were driven by 10 transects with 10 m long, arranged perpendicularly to the shoreline and distant from it by 2 m. In each transection, six equidistant points were marked by 1.66 m. We obtained data on the composition, structure and diversity of aquatic plants assemblies. The distance of the dam and the average depth was measured at each site. Water samples were collected after the sampling of aquatic plants on the sites. The samples were collected at three different points between the central transects. Analyses related to chlorophyll a and the levels of nitrogen and phosphate. The analyzes non-metric multidimensional scaling, clustering and correlogram were used in evaluating the similarity of the structures of the assemblies, while multiple regression analyzes were used to relate the indices of diversity with environmental variables. The results showed that increasing the structural similarity of these assemblies was not associated with spatial distance between the sites and only the heterogeneity index was associated to the flood pulse because it was related to depth. The results for the structure of the assemblies are in broad agreement with the proposals of the flood pulse concept, but the same was not observed for diversity.