Abstract
As ecological patterns are scale dependent, making decisions about sampling design critical. In the context of community assembly, many metrics have been developed to quantify species segregation and aggregation, of which the checkerboard metric (C-score) and the V-ratio are widely used. Using data that describe the spatial pattern of four species-rich, Mediterranean-climate, shrubland communities, we confirm the scale dependence of these metrics. At three of the four sites, we observed that the co-occurrence metrics monotonically increased across all the spatial grains we assessed; at the other site, the previously reported hump-shaped relationship between spatial grain and co-occurrence metrics was observed. The spatial grain at which measures of co-occurrence peaked varied across the plant communities and taxa and increased with exclusion of the less frequently sampled species. Inferences about community assembly using co-occurrence metrics must recognise their inherent scale dependence, and the inferential tools developed in spatial point pattern analysis may facilitate this task.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the many people who helped with collection of field data, especially Paul Reich, Nick Bond, Kelly Hunt, Rob Dunn, Tianhua He, Eva Mosner, Perry Swanborough, Wesley Lamont, Meredith Fairbanks, Liliane Gerhardt, Tom Nagel and Allan and Lorraine Tinker. This research was funded by ARC Discovery Grant No. DP034255.
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Communicated by Carissa Lyn Wonkka.
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Perry, G.L.W., Miller, B.P., Lamont, B.B. et al. Matrix-level co-occurrence metrics are sensitive to sampling grain: a case study in species-rich shrublands. Plant Ecol 221, 1083–1090 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-020-01063-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-020-01063-8