Discussion
In our study system, habitat filtering was the most important process driving the local distribution of the species in a restingaforest, because species distribution showed associations, albeit of different strength, to environmental variables. We did not detect spatial patterns that are consistent with interspecific competition, i.e. spatial segregation and smaller size of nearby congeners, and the three Myrcia species do not seem to show evidences of stochasticity even though congeners were spatially independent, since they responded to differences in the environment. Last, dispersal limitation only led to spatial associations of different size classes for one species studied. Even though many studies on topo-edaphic variation in tropical forests (e.g. Baldeck et al. , 2012), including flooded areas (Baraloto et al. , 2007; Oliveira et al. , 2014), have shown that habitat filtering is an important ecological process, other processes that drive community structuring may have gone undetected (see Wang et al. , 2015).