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

Knowing the factors that influence abundance, distribution and species richness is key to establish local conservation strategies. We evaluated the influence of vegetation type(pine, oak- alder-forest and grassland) and (dry, wet) seasonon the assemblage rodentin a mosaic of temperate forestin Mexico. The completeness of the inventory was evaluated by nonparametric estimators ACE and Jackknife. We use a generalized linear modelto evaluate the effect of vegetation type, seasonand interaction ( vegetation type* season) on the richness and abundance of rodents. The effect of factors and their interaction on the abundance of each species were evaluated with two-way analysisof variancewith rank transformations. To analyze changes in the assembly structure we used rank-curves abundances and ANCOVA to assess differences in dominances/evenness of species. We found that rodentswere more abundant in the pine forest and during the dry season, but the interaction between oak- alderforest and the dry seasonalso favored abundance. At species level, Peromyscus melanotiswas abundant in the pine forest and Reithrodontomysfulvescens in the oak- alder-forest. Between seasons, only the abundance of P. maniculatu s was higher in the dry seasonthan the wet season. The results show that mosaics with trees are of crucial importance for rodent’s conservation during the dry seasons.