Environmental filtering rather than dispersal limitation dominated plant community assembly in the Zoige Plateau

• Published in: Ecology and evolution Vol. 12; no. 7; pp. e9117 - n/a
• Main Authors: Yang, Jianping, Su, Peixi, Zhou, Zijuan, Shi, Rui, Ding, Xinjing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01.07.2022; John Wiley and Sons Inc; Wiley
• Subjects: Altitude; Ammonia; Assembly; Biodiversity; community assembly; Community Ecology; Conservation Ecology; Decay; Dispersal; Dispersion; distance decay; Environmental conditions; environmental filtering; Filtration; Flowers & plants; Hypotheses; Meadows; Molybdenum; Niche breadth; Niche overlap; Nitrates; Nitrogen; Phosphorus; Plant communities; Plant populations; Population decline; Potassium; Precipitation; Redundancy; Relative abundance; Similarity; species assemblage similarity; Stochastic models; Stochastic processes; Stochasticity; Sustainable development; Variation; Wildlife conservation; distance decay; environmental filtering; species assemblage similarity; community assembly
• ISSN: 2045-7758; 2045-7758
• DOI: 10.1002/ece3.9117

Identifying the mechanisms that underlie the assembly of plant communities is critical to the conservation of terrestrial biodiversity. However, it is seldom measured or quantified how much deterministic versus stochastic processes contribute to community assembly in alpine meadows. Here, we measured the decay in community similarity with spatial and environmental distance in the Zoige Plateau. Furthermore, we used redundancy analysis (RDA) to divide the variations in the relative abundance of plant families into four components to assess the effects of environmental and spatial. Species assemblage similarity liner declined with geographical distance (p < .001, R2 = .6388), and it decreased significantly with increasing distance of total phosphorus (TP), alkali‐hydrolyzable nitrogen (AN), available potassium (AK), nitrate nitrogen (NO3+–N), and ammonia nitrogen (NH4+–N). Environmental and spatial variables jointly explained a large proportion (55.2%) of the variation in the relative abundance of plant families. Environmental variables accounted for 13.1% of the total variation, whereas spatial variables accounted for 11.4%, perhaps due to the pronounced abiotic gradients in the alpine areas. Our study highlights the mechanism of plant community assembly in the alpine ecosystem, where environmental filtering plays a more important role than dispersal limitation. In addition, a reasonably controlled abundance of Compositae (the family with the highest niche breadth and large niche overlap value with Gramineae and Cyperaceae) was expected to maintain sustainable development in pastoral production. These results suggest that management measures should be developed with the goal of improving or maintaining suitable local environmental conditions. Environmental filtering dominated plant community assembly in the Zoige Plateau.