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Scale-dependent effect of biotic interactions and environmental conditions in community assembly: insight from a large temperate forest plot

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Abstract

In forested ecosystems, it remains unclear whether environmental conditions, resource competition or their joint effects explain non-randomly distributed species pattern. Recently, trait-based approaches have been recognized as an important tool to infer processes governing community assembly patterns. In this study, we quantify patterns of functional composition and diversity to study how tree species coexistence is influenced by abiotic factors and biotic interactions in a species-rich temperate old-growth forest. In a 25 ha (500 × 500 m) fully mapped forest plot, we calculated functional composition (community weighted mean) and diversity of five key traits considering two spatial scales (20 × 20 and 50 × 50 m quadrats). We compared the observed patterns in functional diversity with randomly generated null communities to test for the presence of non-random patterns in community assembly, and studied the variation of functional composition and diversity along gradients of soil conditions to test for the shift in assembly processes along resource gradients. Functional diversity differed from null expectations depending on the spatial scale considered. In broad-scale quadrats (50 × 50 m), functional diversity in wood specific gravity (WSG) and leaf area (LA) was lower than expected by chance, whereas functional diversity in specific root length (SRL) was greater than expected. In small quadrats (20 × 20 m), functional diversity was lower than expected by chance in specific leaf area (SLA) and when considering all traits in combination. Functional composition and diversity varied along the soil resource gradient but the results were dependent on the scale considered. We found an increase in functional composition in maximum height (H) and WSG and a reduction in the functional diversity in most of traits suggesting an increase in competition with the increase in soil water content at small scale. The trait dispersion pattern for all traits in combination had no directional changes with some of individual traits generating more clear dispersion trend when the dominant competitor Pinus koraiensis was removed from the community dataset. The results presented here suggest that community assembly is governed by non-random processes in the studied forests. Interestingly, the choice of quadrat size seems to be crucial to describe community patterns and infer the forces governing community assembly. The consideration of different traits and environmental gradients allowed us to discover that different assembly mechanisms operate simultaneously in the studied forest.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Zhao YQ, Xing DL, Song BZ and He XC for collecting species traits data in field. This study was sponsored by the external cooperation program of BIC, Chinese Academy of Sciences (151221KYSB20130003), National Natural Science Foundation of China (41301057 and 31370444). This paper was also supported by CFERN & GENE Award Funds on Ecological Paper.

Authors’ contributions

YZQ, AG and HZQ conceived the study, analysed the data and wrote the paper. YZQ, LF, WXG, YJ and FS performed the research, collected the data and provided extensive revisions on the manuscript. JM provided extensive revisions to the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Management, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Science, Shenyang, 110164, People’s Republic of China

    Zuoqiang Yuan, Fei Lin, Xugao Wang, Ji Ye, Yanyan Suo, Shuai Fang & Zhanqing Hao

  2. Instituto Pirenaico de Ecologia, IPE-CSIC, Avenida Montanana 1005, 50010, Saragossa, Spain

    Antonio Gazol

  3. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100049, People’s Republic of China

    Yanyan Suo & Shuai Fang

  4. Centre for Biodiversity Theory and Modelling, Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS, 09200, Moulis, France

    Jarad Mellard

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  1. Zuoqiang Yuan
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Communicated by Peter Minchin.

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Yuan, Z., Gazol, A., Lin, F. et al. Scale-dependent effect of biotic interactions and environmental conditions in community assembly: insight from a large temperate forest plot. Plant Ecol 217, 1003–1014 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-016-0626-5

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