Correlation of variations in species abundance of Atlantic forests regenerating on abandoned pastures with different environmental and spatial variables

The conversion of native forests into pastures is still a common practice in Brazil. Abandoned have great potential for natural regeneration and therefore could play an important role meeting the enormous demand forest restoration. Few studies, however, investigated extent to which spatially-structured environmental variables community structure are correlated with variation species abundance regenerating on abandoned pastures. Therefore, we aimed determine whether spatial were capable explaining woody subtropical Atlantic Forest. We systematically distributed 45 sample plots size inclusion criteria that changed according vegetation layer three different In general, most our models able explain was spatially-unstructured physical-chemical soil properties. A smaller part topography-related variables. An even portion but not results suggest more closely related niche-based processes mediated by than stochastic processes.