Environmental filtration and dispersal limitation explain different aspects of beta diversity in desert plant communities

Species dissimilarity (beta diversity) primarily reflects the spatio–temporal changes in the species composition of a plant community. The correlations between β diversity and environmental factors and spatial distance can be used to explain the magnitudes of environmental filtering and dispersal. However, little is known about the relative roles and importance of neutral and niche-related factors in the assemblage of plant communities with different life forms in deserts. We found that in desert ecosystems, the β diversity of herbaceous plants was the highest, followed by that of shrubs and trees. The changes in the β diversity of herbs and shrubs had stronger correlations with the environment, indicating that community aggregation was strongly affected by niche processes. The soil water content and salt content were the key environmental factors affecting species distributions of the herb and shrub layers, respectively. Spatial distance explained a larger amount of the variation in tree composition, indicating that dispersal limitation was the main factor affecting the construction of the tree layer community. The results suggest that different life forms may determine the association between organisms and the environment. These findings suggest that the spatial patterns of plant community species in the Ebinur Lake desert ecosystem are the result of the combined effects of environmental filtering and dispersal limitation.

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Impacts of Land-Use Changes on Vegetation and Ecosystem Functioning: Old-Field Secondary Succession

Plants ◽

10.3390/plants10050990 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (5) ◽

pp. 990

Author(s):

Javier Pérez-Hernández ◽

Rosario G. Gavilán

Keyword(s):

Plant Communities ◽

Ecosystem Functioning ◽

Secondary Succession ◽

Species Coexistence ◽

Human Impacts ◽

Soil Seed Bank ◽

Land Use Changes ◽

Dispersal Limitation ◽

Point Of View ◽

Old Field

The study of ecological succession to determine how plant communities re-assemble after a natural or anthropogenic disturbance has always been an important topic in ecology. The understanding of these processes forms part of the new theories of community assembly and species coexistence, and is attracting attention in a context of expanding human impacts. Specifically, new successional studies provide answers to different mechanisms of community assemblage, and aim to define the importance of deterministic or stochastic processes in the succession dynamic. Biotic limits, which depend directly on biodiversity (i.e., species competition), and abiotic filtering, which depends on the environment, become particularly important when they are exceeded, making the succession process more complicated to reach the previous disturbance stage. Plant functional traits (PFTs) are used in secondary succession studies to establish differences between abandonment stages or to compare types of vegetation or flora, and are more closely related to the functioning of plant communities. Dispersal limitation is a PFT considered an important process from a stochastic point of view because it is related to the establishing of plants. Related to it the soil seed bank plays an important role in secondary succession because it is essential for ecosystem functioning. Soil compounds and microbial community are important variables to take into account when studying any succession stage. Chronosequence is the best way to study the whole process at different time scales. Finally, our objective in this review is to show how past studies and new insights are being incorporated into the basis of classic succession. To further explore this subject we have chosen old-field recovery as an example of how a number of different plant communities, including annual and perennial grasslands and shrublands, play an important role in secondary succession.

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Local-scale determinants of arboreal spider beta diversity in a temperate forest: roles of tree architecture, spatial distance, and dispersal capacity

PeerJ ◽

10.7717/peerj.5596 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 6 ◽

pp. e5596 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Qiongdao Zhang ◽

Dong He ◽

Hua Wu ◽

Wei Shi ◽

Cong Chen

Keyword(s):

Beta Diversity ◽

Environmental Gradient ◽

Dispersal Limitation ◽

Local Scale ◽

Tree Architecture ◽

Habitat Specialization ◽

Spatial Distance ◽

Species Variation ◽

Dispersal Capacity ◽

Canopy Volume

Spiders are a functionally important taxon in forest ecosystems, but the determinants of arboreal spider beta diversity are poorly understood at the local scale. We examined spider assemblages in 324 European beech (Fagus sylvatica) trees of varying sizes across three forest stands in Würzburg (Germany) to disentangle the roles of tree architecture, spatial distance, and dispersal capacity on spider turnover across individual trees. A large proportion of tree pairs (66%) showed higher compositional dissimilarity in spider assemblages than expected by chance, suggesting prominent roles of habitat specialization and/or dispersal limitation. Trees with higher dissimilarity in DBH and canopy volume, and to a lesser extent in foliage cover, supported more dissimilar spider assemblages, suggesting that tree architecture comprised a relevant environmental gradient of sorting spider species. Variation partitioning revealed that 28.4% of the variation in beta diversity was jointly explained by tree architecture, spatial distance (measured by principal coordinates of neighbor matrices) and dispersal capacity (quantified by ballooning propensity). Among these, dispersal capacity accounted for a comparable proportion as spatial distance did (6.8% vs. 5.9%). Beta diversity did not significantly differ between high- and low-vagility groups, but beta diversity in species with high vagility was more strongly determined by spatially structured environmental variation. Altogether, both niche specialization, along the environmental gradient defined by tree architecture, and dispersal limitation are responsible for structuring arboreal spider assemblages. High dispersal capacity of spiders appears to reinforce the role of niche-related processes.

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Changes in Monte Desert plant communities induced by a subterranean mammal

Journal of Arid Environments ◽

10.1006/jare.2000.0724 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 47 (3) ◽

pp. 339-345 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Claudia M. Campos ◽

Stella M. Giannoni ◽

Carlos E. Borghi

Keyword(s):

Plant Communities ◽

Desert Plant ◽

Monte Desert ◽

Subterranean Mammal

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Diversity Indices of Plant Communities and Their Rhizosphere Microbiomes: An Attempt to Find the Connection

Microorganisms ◽

10.3390/microorganisms9112339 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (11) ◽

pp. 2339

Author(s):

Aleksei O. Zverev ◽

Arina A. Kichko ◽

Aleksandr G. Pinaev ◽

Nikolay A. Provorov ◽

Evgeny E. Andronov

Keyword(s):

Microbial Communities ◽

Plant Communities ◽

Plant Diversity ◽

Beta Diversity ◽

Mutual Influence ◽

Plant Root ◽

Alpha Diversity ◽

Diversity Indices ◽

Alpha And Beta Diversity ◽

Highly Correlated

The rhizosphere community represents an “ecological interface” between plant and soil, providing the plant with a number of advantages. Despite close connection and mutual influence in this system, the knowledge about the connection of plant and rhizosphere diversity is still controversial. One of the most valuable factors of this uncertainty is a rough estimation of plant diversity. NGS sequencing can make the estimations of the plant community more precise than classical geobotanical methods. We investigate fallow and crop sites, which are similar in terms of environmental conditions and soil legacy, yet at the same time are significantly different in terms of plant diversity. We explored amplicons of both the plant root mass (ITS1 DNA) and the microbial communities (16S rDNA); determined alpha- and beta-diversity indices and their correlation, and performed differential abundance analysis. In the analysis, there is no correlation between the alpha-diversity indices of plants and the rhizosphere microbial communities. The beta-diversity between rhizosphere microbial communities and plant communities is highly correlated (R = 0.866, p = 0.01). ITS1 sequencing is effective for the description of plant root communities. There is a connection between rhizosphere communities and the composition of plants, but on the alpha-diversity level we found no correlation. In the future, the connection of alpha-diversities should be explored using ITS1 sequencing, even in more similar plant communities—for example, in different synusia.

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Partitioning the colonization and extinction components of beta diversity: Spatiotemporal species turnover across disturbance gradients

10.1101/2020.02.24.956631 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Shinichi Tatsumi ◽

Joachim Strengbom ◽

Mihails Čugunovs ◽

Jari Kouki

Keyword(s):

Plant Communities ◽

Beta Diversity ◽

Species Turnover ◽

Single Point ◽

Relative Importance ◽

Dynamic Nature ◽

Colonization Dynamics ◽

Per Se ◽

The Given ◽

Temporal Species Turnover

ABSTRACTChanges in species diversity often result from species losses and gains. The dynamic nature of beta diversity (i.e., spatial variation in species composition) that derives from such temporal species turnover, however, has been largely overlooked. Here, we disentangled extinction and colonization components of beta diversity by using the sets of species that went locally extinct and that newly colonized the given sites. We applied this concept of extinction and colonization beta diversity to plant communities that have been repeatedly measured in experimentally disturbed forests. We first found no difference in beta diversity across disturbance gradients when it was analyzed for communities at a single point in time. From this result, we might conclude that disturbance caused no impact on how species assemble across space. However, when we analyzed the extinction and colonization beta diversity, both measures were found to be significantly lower in disturbed sites compared to undisturbed sites. These results indicate that disturbance removed similar subsets of species across space, making communities differentiate, but at the same time induced spatially uniform colonization of new species, causing communities to homogenize. Consequently, the effects of these two processes canceled each other out. The relative importance of extinction and colonization components per se also changed temporally after disturbance. Analyses using extinction and colonization beta diversity allowed us to detect nonrandom dis- and re-assembly dynamics in plant communities. Our results suggest that common practices of analyzing beta diversity at one point in time can mask significant variation driven by disturbance. Acknowledging the extinction–colonization dynamics behind beta diversity is essential for understanding the spatiotemporal organization of biodiversity.

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