Detangling the Effects of Environmental Filtering and Dispersal Limitation on Aggregated Distributions of Tree and Shrub Species: Life Stage Matters

Qing-Song Yang, Guo-Chun Shen, He-Ming Liu, Zhang-Hua Wang, Zun-Ping Ma, Xiao-Feng Fang, Jian Zhang and Xi-Hua Wang

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 5, 1-16

Abstract: The pervasive pattern of aggregated tree distributions in natural communities is commonly explained by the joint effect of two clustering processes: environmental filtering and dispersal limitation, yet little consensus remains on the relative importance of the two clustering processes on tree aggregations. Different life stages of examined species were thought to be one possible explanation of this disagreement, because the effect of environmental filtering and dispersal limitation are expected to increase and decrease with tree life stages, respectively. However, few studies have explicitly tested these expectations. In this study, we evaluated these expectations by three different methods (species-habitat association test based on Poisson Clustering model and spatial point pattern analyses based on Heterogeneous Poisson model and the jointly modeling approach) using 36 species in a 20-ha subtropical forest plot. Our results showed that the percentage of species with significant habitat association increased with life stages, and there were fewer species affected by dispersal limitation in later life stages compared with those in earlier stages. Percentage of variance explained by the environmental filtering and dispersal limitation also increases and decreases with life stages. These results provided a promising alternative explanation on the existing mixed results about the relative importance of the two clustering processes. These findings also highlighted the importance of plant life stages for fully understanding species distributions and species coexistence.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0156326 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 56326&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0156326

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0156326

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().