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Strong plant-soil associations in a heterogeneous subtropical broad-leaved forest

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Abstract

The relative importance of deterministic and neutral processes on community assembly is currently a topic of much debate among ecologists. Analyzing species-environment associations is an effective way to assess the importance of deterministic process such as niche differentiation, but both habitat association and dispersal limitation can produce similar patterns of spatial aggregation in species. Therefore, it is crucial to control for the impact of dispersal limitation on species distributions when analyzing species-environment associations. We sampled soil with high resolutions in a 24 ha stem-mapped subtropical forest and tested plant-soil associations. We controlled for the influence of dispersal limitation by employing the homogeneous Thomas process to simulate the effect of dispersal limitation on the aggregation of tree species. After controlling for the effect of dispersal limitation, we found that the spatial heterogeneity of soil properties was associated with distributions of 88.2% (90 of 102 species) of tree species in this subtropical forest. Furthermore, not only did soil properties influence the distribution of tree species, but also tree species tended to affect properties of the soil around them. The soil factors most strongly influencing species distributions were TC, TN, TP, K, Mg, Si, soil moisture, and bulk density. We found the spatial heterogeneity of soil properties to be strongly associated with tree species distributions. Niche partitioning of soil gradients contributed substantially to species coexistence in this subtropical forest.

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Abbreviations

GTS:

24 ha Gutianshan Forest Dynamic Plot

Nmin:

Nitrogen mineralization rate

TC:

Total C

TN:

Total N

TP:

Total P

BD:

Bulk density

PCA:

Principal Correspondence Analysis

CCA:

Canonical Correspondence Analysis

PCs:

Principal Components

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Fangliang He and Peter Kuehn for providing useful suggestions on soil sample design and analysis. We are very grateful to Fusuo Zhang and Jianlan Song at the China Agricultural University for providing help in analyzing soil nutrients. We are grateful for help in the field from graduate students XingXing Man and Bo Yang. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, which have been very helpful for improving the manuscript. We would also like to thank Anne Bjorkman at the University of British Columbia for her assistance with English language and grammatical editing of the manuscript. This research is funded by Key Innovation Project of Chinese Academic Science (KZCX2-YW-430).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The CAS/Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Coastal Zone Environmental Processes, Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yantai, 264003, China

    Liwen Zhang & Hongbo Shao

  2. State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 20 Nanxincun, Xiangshan, Beijing, 100093, China

    Liwen Zhang, Xiangcheng Mi & Keping Ma

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  1. Liwen Zhang
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  2. Xiangcheng Mi
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  3. Hongbo Shao
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  4. Keping Ma
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Correspondence to Keping Ma.

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Zhang, L., Mi, X., Shao, H. et al. Strong plant-soil associations in a heterogeneous subtropical broad-leaved forest. Plant Soil 347, 211–220 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-011-0839-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-011-0839-2

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