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A functional-trait approach reveals community diversity and assembly processes responses to flood disturbance in a subtropical wetland

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Ecological Research

Abstract

Despite the strong effects of disturbance on plant community diversity and assembly, we do not fully understand how different aspects of taxonomic or functional diversity respond to disturbance or how different assembly processes change along a disturbance gradient. In this study, plant communities were sampled and the distributions of three functional traits were measured in 45 plots across a flood disturbance gradient in Poyang Lake wetland in China. We examined the within-community means, ranges, variances, kurtoses, and other parameters of trait values. Results showed that the effects of disturbance depended largely on the aspects of diversity considered. Along the flood disturbance gradient, taxonomic/functional richness did not change, while Shannon–Wiener diversity and evenness and functional evenness and dispersion showed significant unimodal patterns. Communities experiencing the highest disturbance levels tended to have significantly shorter shoot heights with lower specific leaf area (SLA). We also found a significant non-random functional trait distribution: a significant reduction in the range and variance of SLA and a more even distribution of the measured traits compared with the null model. Our results highlight that niche-based assembly processes play structuring roles in wetland plant community response to flood disturbance gradients and that both environmental filtering and limiting similarity can work on the same traits (e.g., SLA) through hierarchical effects on the distribution of functional traits within communities.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31300398, 31400404) and the Science and Technology Program of Jiangxi Provincial Department of Water Resources (KT201212). We thank Jutao Liu, Ping Chen, Lei Han, Qian Lou, Binhua Hu and Guanjun Yu for their invaluable help in the field. Our field work also received valued support from The Administration for National Nature Reserve of Nanjishan Wetland in Poyang Lake, Jiangxi Province. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and Dr. Yasuhiro Kubota, who provided helpful comments and excellent suggestions.

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  1. Jiangxi Provincial Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Environment of Poyang Lake, Jiangxi Institute of Water Sciences, Beijing East Road 1038, Nanchang, 330029, People’s Republic of China

    Hui Fu, Jiayou Zhong, Guixiang Yuan, Chunjing Guo, Huijun Ding, Qian Feng & Qun Fu

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  1. Hui Fu
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  2. Jiayou Zhong
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Correspondence to Jiayou Zhong.

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Fu, H., Zhong, J., Yuan, G. et al. A functional-trait approach reveals community diversity and assembly processes responses to flood disturbance in a subtropical wetland. Ecol Res 30, 57–66 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-014-1207-5

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