Environmental factors related to biogeographical transition zones of areas of endemism of Neotropical mammals

NOGUERA-URBANO ELKIN ALEXI; FERRO, IGNACIO

AUSTRALIAN SYSTEMATIC BOTANY

CSIRO PUBLISHING

Lugar: Collingwood; Año: 2018 vol. 30 p. 485 - 494

1030-1887

Biogeographical transition zones are areas of a complex biotic mixture located at the borders between biogeographical units. Climatic, physical and ecological factors should play an important role in allowing coexistence of different biotic elements in the transition zone. Here, we explore the relationship between environmental factors and biogeographical transition zones, defined by Neotropical mammals distributions, via by a model selection approach based on the Akaike information criterion and accounting for the spatial structure in the data. We detected three areas of high overlap between mammalian areas of endemism. Two of them corresponding corresponded to the following well-established regional-level transition zones: , namely Mexican (MTZ) and South American transition zones (SATZ) transition zones; the third was one located in South south-eEastern Brazil, roughly approximatelybetween the Paraná and Chacoan dominion that we call: The Atlantic Forest integration zone (AF). Only one explicative variable was shared by the three transitions zones (precipitation of the warmest quarter). However, shared variables with great explanatory power pointed outsuggestindicated two environmental aspects as facilitators for the coexistence of different biotic components in a given geographical area. The first one is was the heterogeneity component, either topographic for the SATZ and MTZ or climatic for the AF. The second one is was related non-extreme thermal conditions, precipitation of the warmest quarter, interpreted as a thermal buffer, shared by AF and SATZ, and isothermality shared by MTZ and SATZ.