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Periodic inundations drive community assembly of amphibious plants in floodplain lakes

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A Correction to this article was published on 22 October 2020

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Abstract

Understanding the effects of disturbance regimes on community assembly is an essential issue in community ecology. Yet, little is known about how water regimes drive community assembly considering functional facets in aquatic communities. We detected functional trait patterns of amphibious plant communities and checked the effects of inundations on these patterns, using null model analyses based on observational data of 20 Yangtze River floodplain lakes. Amphibious plant communities in the study lakes were dominated by perennials and a large proportion (61.2%) of communities were species-poor (species richness < 3). Null model analyses based on both incidence and biomass data showed 95.6% species-rich communities (species richness ≥ 3) presented randomness trait patterns. A higher proportion of randomness was found in the post-flood (98.8%) than pre-flood (89.7%) communities, and randomness tended to be more important as inundation increased. We showed for the first time the effects of periodic inundations on trait patterns of amphibious plants in floodplain lakes. Our results suggested that randomness would be common and important at a fine scale even in highly disturbed habitats. We further put forward a new conceptual framework regarding the underlying assembly mechanisms that water regimes drove aquatic plant communities in river floodplain ecosystems.

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  • 22 October 2020

    Due to an unfortunate mistake during the production process, some rows in Table 1 were distorted. The original article has been corrected and the correct display of Table 1 is also published here.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Xiaoke Zhang and Zhendong Yang for field work, and Yajing He for preparation of the map. We also thank Firas F. Asfar for helpful comments on the early draft. This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFC0404502, 2018YFC0407200) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (51579234, 41371054).

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Xueqin Liu, Saibo Yuan & Hongzhu Wang

  2. Wuhan City Flood Control Survey and Design Institute Limited Company, Wuhan, 430014, China

    Saibo Yuan

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The original version of this article has been revised: some rows in Table 1 were distorted.

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Liu, X., Yuan, S. & Wang, H. Periodic inundations drive community assembly of amphibious plants in floodplain lakes. Hydrobiologia 847, 4207–4217 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04401-z

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