Influence of vegetation type and season on rodent assemblage in a Mexican temperate forest mosaic

Abstract

Knowing the factors that influence abundance, distribution and species richness is key to establishing local conservation strategies. We evaluated the influence of vegetation type (pine forest, oak alder forest and grassland) and season (dry, wet), on the rodent assemblage (richness and abundance in space and time) in a mosaic of temperate forest in Mexico. The completeness of the inventory was evaluated by nonparametric estimators ACE and Jackknife. We used a GLM to evaluate the effect of vegetation type, season and interaction (vegetation type∗season) on the richness and abundance of rodents. The effects of factors and their interaction on the abundance of each species were evaluated with twoway ANOVA with rank transformations. To analyze changes in the rodent assembly structure, we used rank curves abundances and ANCOVA to assess differences in species relative abundance (dominance). We found that rodents were more abundant in the pine forest and during the dry season, but the interaction between oak alder forest and the dry season also favored abundance. At the species level, Peromyscus melanotis was abundant in the pine forest and Reithrodontomys fulvescens in the oak alder forest. Between seasons, only the abundance of P. maniculatus and P. melanotis was higher in the dry season than the wet season. The results show that in a temperate forest mosaics with trees are of crucial importance for rodent conservation during the dry season. However connectivity among temperate plant communities (pine forest, oak alder forest and grassland) must be a strategy to consider in the study of rodents assemblage and their dynamics in temperate forests.