Relações espécie-área em comunidades neutras e não neutras

Abstract

The rate at which species accumulate with increased sample size - the species-area relationship - is one of the most basic and fundamental problem in biogeography. This relationship has profound significance in understanding the generation and maintenance of biodiversity in an ecosystem. In this sense, this thesis introduces two models of community dynamics within two different frameworks: The first investigate the spatial patterns of species distribution in fragmented landscapes within the framework of the neutral theory. In the second approach the spatial patterns of species distribution on the genetic variability is studied under the assumption that natural selection has a prominent role in driving the evolution of such populations. Additionally, the model assumes that the environment is heterogeneous, such that the strength of natural selection depends on the localization of the species in the lattice. Our results for the neutral community model show that fragmentation has an important influence in shaping the specie-area relationship. In particular, the level of fragmentation than changes the size of the area interval when the species-area relation is well described by a power-law, S ∼ Az. We also investigate the biodiversity on the percolating cluster. In the non-neutral model our simulation results demonstrate that the level of heterogeneity of the environment affects the shape of the genetic-area relationships. But it is possible to recover the triphasic scenario for low and intermediate level of heterogeneity.