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).