Fertilidade do solo como principal preditor da abundância de mamíferos herbívoros em ilhas fluviais do Rio Negro, Amazônia

Abstract

The key factors driving species distribution within fluvial island systems worldwide are poorly known. Previous studies have shown that herbivore abundance and proportion in the mammal assemblage can be indirectly influenced by soil fertility via production of nutritious fruits and leaves and higher ecosystem dynamics linked to vegetation growth on more productive soils.The goal of this study was to investigate which environmental (soil fertility, tree basal area, forest cover and distance from sampling point to nearest mainland) and anthropogenic factors (logging, distance from the sampling point to nearest human community) were most closely-linked to observed patterns of mammalian abundance and proportions of omnivorous and herbivorous mammals on fluvial islands of the Rio Negro, Amazonas State, Brazil. Several of these islands are located on the left bank of the river, and so receive nutrient-rich sediments from the Rio Branco. We expected that our chosen environmental and anthoropogenic factors could predict island mammalian abundance patterns. We used camera traps to examine this, surveying 49 sampling sites across 60 days when water levels were seasonally low.We calculated the proportion of herbivorous and omnivorous mammals per site, and assayed their relationships to predictor variables with a series of generalized linear models (GLM). As expected, the number of records was low on all studied fluvial islands, compared with upland terra-firme studies. In 70,560 sampling hours we obtained 126 independent camera trap records, for a total of 11 mammal species. Total mammal abundance and proportion of the generalist omnivore Didelphis marsupialis was not affected by our chosen environmental and antropic variables. However, soil fertility played a central role in determining the proportion of herbivorous species.Thus, gradients of soil fertility can help to explain herbivore distributions on riverine islands, and define crucial areas for conservation and future restoration.Additionally, logging, distance to the nearest human community and to the mainland had a positive effect, and forest cover a negative effect, on the proportion of herbivorous mammals, but did not affect generalist omnivorous species. Therefore, results suggest that island soil fertility can differentialy impact proportions of mammals from the same feeding guild.