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Varying patterns of vegetation dynamics across multiple levels of organization in a salt marsh of the Danish Wadden Sea

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Abstract

In the literature of salt marsh ecology, it remains challenging to determine whether vegetation dynamics in different communities are convergent toward a common structure controlled by the surrounding environmental conditions, or divergent contingent upon disturbance histories and variations in the order and timing of species arrivals. Based on the survey of species composition in a Danish salt marsh between 2006 and 2013, we show that the answer depends on which level of organization is being considered. At the level of individual plots (2 m2), each plot exhibited a distinct pathway of compositional changes from one another (i.e., divergence), within the ordination diagram constructed by nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS). When these plots were aggregated into vegetation groups classified by a hierarchical cluster analysis, each group drifted with no particular order in the NMDS space until 2012, but, in 2013, finally converged toward the initial state of 2006. These findings indicate that group-level convergent and plot level diversifying processes operate simultaneously in salt marshes, making overall vegetation dynamics both deterministic and historically contingent, respectively.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partly supported by a National Science Foundation Geography and Regional Science Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (No. 0825753) and Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, FNU Grant 272-07-0431. Thanks are due to Catherine Brereton of the Writing Center at the University of Kentucky for her professional English editing service.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biogeomorphology Research and Analysis Group, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA

    Daehyun Kim

  2. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 10, 1350, København K, Denmark

    Jesper Bartholdy

  3. Espergærde Gymnasium og HF, Gymnasievej 2, 3060, Espergærde, Denmark

    Anders T. Bartholdy

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  1. Daehyun Kim
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Correspondence to Daehyun Kim.

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Kim, D., Bartholdy, J. & Bartholdy, A.T. Varying patterns of vegetation dynamics across multiple levels of organization in a salt marsh of the Danish Wadden Sea. Hydrobiologia 771, 67–81 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-015-2615-4

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