Historical and contemporary correlates of snake biogeographical subregions in the Atlantic Forest hotspot

Abstract

Aim Snake faunal dissimilarity within tropical forests is not well characterized, nor are the factors underlying these patterns. Our aim was to disentangle the ecological and historical factors driving biogeographical subregions (BSR) for snakes.Location Brazilian Atlantic Forest (BAF). MethodsWe compiled 274 snake inventories to build a species-by-site matrix and used unconstrained ordination and clustering techniques to identify the number of snake BSR. We applied an interpolation method to map axes of compositional variation over the whole extent of the BAF, and then classified the compositional dissimilarity according to the number of snake BSR identified a priori. We used multinomial logistic regression models and deviance partitioning techniques to investigate the influence of contemporary climatic stability, productivity, topographic complexity, and historical climate shifts in explaining the BSR. ResultsWe identified 198 snake species organized into six BSR, three of them located along the BAF coast and the other three predominantly inland BSR. Climatic stability made the largest contribution to explaining the variability in snake BSR, followed by productivity and historical variation in climate. Topography was important only if historical variation in climate was excluded from the analysis.Main conclusions The highest rates of snake endemism within BAF were in the coastal BSR, as compared to the inland BSR that are mostly composed of open habitat specialists. Our findings suggest that the topographic complexity of the BAF acts on snake distributions not as a physical barrier, but rather as a climatic barrier, providing historical climate refuges for species living along altitudinal gradients. Overall, the predominance of climatic stability and historic variation in climate in explaining snake BSR reinforces the importance of thermoregulatory constraints in shaping the distribution of tropical ectotherm species.Dev. expl (%) = percentage of deviance explained, AICc = Akaike's information criterion corrected for small sample sizes, wAICc = AICc weight. Cstab = contemporary climatic stability, Prod = productivity, Topo = topographic complexity, Cclim = contemporary climate (Cstab + Prod), Hclim = historical variation in climate. See Methods for individual predictor abbreviation.

Aridity, soil and biome stability influence plant ecoregions in the Atlantic Forest, a biodiversity hotspot in South America

“…They also regarded the issue of how we delimit and map biogeographical regions as critical for continentalscale macroevolutionary and biogeographical studies, in face of the lack of consistency and precision in the way supposed phytogeographic regions are partitioned, categorized and mapped. Recent studies have shown complex internal structure of amphibian and snake species assemblages in the domain (Vasconcelos et al 2014, Moura et al 2017, and a broad plant biogeographical split into its northern and southern parts (Carnaval et al 2014, Zizka et al 2018. The Atlantic Forest is one of the main vegetation domains of the continent, originally covering more than 1 000 000 km 2 with lowland, montane, semi-deciduous and deciduous forests, and coastal heath vegetation.…”

Composition and natural history of the snakes from the Parque Estadual da Serra do Papagaio, southern Minas Gerais, Serra da Mantiqueira, Brazil

“…The 24 snake species recorded in this study correspond to approximately 11% of the 219 species known from the phytogeographical domain of the Atlantic Forest (Moura et al 2016). In general, the observed richness to the PESP is similar than that of other sites in the low-elevated Southeast Atlantic Forest (e.g., Marques and Sazima 2004, Centeno et al 2008, Pontes and Rocha 2008, Hartmann et al 2009a,b, São Pedro and Pires 2009, Moura et al 2012, Trevine et al 2014).…”

Redescription, geographic distribution and ecological niche modeling of Elapomorphus wuchereri (Serpentes: Dipsadidae)

“…One might surmise that because seems to be cryptic and rare, it has not been found in these coastal areas. However, we doubt that the species occurs in São Paulo given the distance of São Paulo from the southernmost known records and the distinct biogeographical regionalization from the core distribution of the species ( Moura 2016). It is also noteworthy that some records of voucher specimens from western Espírito Santo and northeastern Minas Gerais were recovered in low probability areas.…”

“…The scarcity of available records across a wide timeframe, virtually unknown population trends, and the possibility of extinction in some historical localities (e.g., the single record from Minas Gerais state) lead us to think that should be assessed et al Moura (2016); these represent, respectively, the coastal or seasonal dry forests from northern Bahia to southern Rio de Janeiro states (in which the core distribution of the species is located), and the Serra do Mar Coastal, Bahia Coastal, and Interior Forests (3 records).…”