Functional and structural attributes of Brazilian tropical and subtropical forests and savannas

Across tropical and subtropical forests and savannas, variation in temperature, precipitation, and edaphic preferences is related to functional characteristics turnover across space. Here we use a unique dataset of 133 woody community sites (127 ha sample and 1351 species included) covering six forest and savanna vegetation types, to reexamine structural and functional patterns and their environmental drivers. Furthermore, we evaluated whether vegetation types (identified by floristic and environmental characteristics) consistently exhibited structural and functional distinctions. We also assessed the importance of vegetation type identity by quantifying the additional contribution of vegetation type in explaining vegetation patterns when compared to environmental models that include temperature, climate, soil and fire. Our variables included fundamental structural characteristics such as number of trees, basal area and average diameter, alongside functional attributes such as aboveground carbon stock, wood density and representativity of multi-stemmed trees. We also include the innovative approach to representativeness of species with compound leaves, which is a proxy for ecological patterns. We found that vegetation types have consistent differentiation for most structural and functional variables, so that vegetation types exist as distinct units beyond floristic differentiation. In addition, environmental variables play an important role in vegetation patterns, but associated with differences between vegetation types for most variables. Overall, vegetation types attributes serve as important drivers of most vegetation variables, contributing up to 30% to the explanation of variable patterns. Our work is the first to explore structural and functional variations among Brazilian tropical and subtropical vegetation types in a broad scale, reviewing ecological patterns previously defined by specific work or carried out using other approaches. Furthermore, our work contributing to the ecological patterns of Brazilian vegetation, in addition to producing reference values that can be used in conservation projects. •Vegetation types are discrete units regarding functional and structural variables.•Vegetation type contributes to the explanation of structural and functional attributes along the environmental gradients.•Climatic and soil variables drive both structural and functional attributes.•Compound-leaf variables are a powerful proxy for functional informatio