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Environmental determinants of woody plant diversity at a regional scale in China.

ABSTRACT: Understanding what drives the geographic variation of species richness across the globe is a fundamental goal of ecology and biogeography. Environmental variables have been considered as drivers of global diversity patterns but there is no consensus among ecologists on what environmental variables are primary drivers of the geographic variation of species richness. Here, I examine the relationship of woody plant species richness at a regional scale in China with sixteen environmental variables representing energy availability, water availability, energy-water balance, seasonality, and habitat heterogeneity. I found that temperature seasonality is the best predictor of woody species richness in China. Other important environmental variables include annual precipitation, mean temperature of the coldest month, and potential evapotranspiration. The best model explains 85% of the variation in woody plant species richness at the regional scale in China.

SUBMITTER: Qian H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3784393 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Environmental determinants of woody plant diversity at a regional scale in China.

Qian Hong H

PloS one 20130926 9

Understanding what drives the geographic variation of species richness across the globe is a fundamental goal of ecology and biogeography. Environmental variables have been considered as drivers of global diversity patterns but there is no consensus among ecologists on what environmental variables are primary drivers of the geographic variation of species richness. Here, I examine the relationship of woody plant species richness at a regional scale in China with sixteen environmental variables r ...[more]

PMID: 24086642

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Project description:Recently, new alternative matrices of biodiversity such as phylogenetic and functional diversity as a complement to species diversity have provided new insights into the mechanisms of community assembly. In this study, we analyzed the phylogenetic signals of five functional traits and the relative contribution of environmental variables and distance matrices to the alpha and beta components of taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity in woody plant assemblages along four local elevational transects on two different mountains. We observed low but significant phylogenetic signals of functional traits, which suggest that phylogenetic dispersion can provide a rough approximation of functional dispersion but not perfect correlations between phylogenetic and functional diversity. Taxonomic alpha diversity showed a monotonic decline with elevation, and climatic variables were the main drivers of this pattern along all studied transects. Furthermore, although the phylogenetic and functional alpha dispersions showed different elevational patterns including increase, decrease and no relationship, the underlying processes driving the patterns of both types of alpha dispersion could be explained by the gradients of climatic and habitat variables as well as biotic interactions such as competition. These results suggest that both alpha dispersion patterns may be significantly controlled by niche-based deterministic processes such as biotic interactions and environmental filtering in our study areas. Moreover, the beta diversity with geographical distances showed distance-decay relationships for all transects. Although the relative importance of the environmental and geographical distances for beta diversity varied across the three facets of diversity and the transects, we generally found that environmental distances were more important for the beta components of the three facets of diversity. However, we cannot discriminate the effects of both distances on the three facets of diversity. Therefore, our study suggests that niche-based deterministic processes, potentially combined with neutral processes such as dispersal limitation and demographic stochasticity, may influence patterns of woody plant assemblage turnover in our study areas.

Project description:Species pool hypothesis is broadly known and frequently tested in various regions and vegetation types. However it has not been tested in the arid Xinjiang region of China due to lack of data. Here with systematic data from references and field survey, we comprehensively examined species pool hypothesis in this region. Took species richness in 0.1° × 0.1° grid cells as regional species richness (RSR) which were obtained from the distribution maps of vascular plant species, and took species diversity of 190 and 103 plots in forest and grassland biomes across Xinjiang as local species richness (LSR), together with the digitalized soil pH and climate data, we tested the species pool hypothesis in this region. We found that: (1) the average RSR was higher in mountains than that in basins and it was negatively correlated with soil pH in mountains while positively correlated with soil pH in basins in Xinjiang; (2) RSR showed a positive correlation with mean annual precipitation (MAP) while showed a hump-shaped pattern with mean annual temperature (MAT); and the changing patterns of LSR were different for forest and grassland along the geographical and climate gradients; (3) LSR of forest was more affected by RSR than by climate, while on the contrary, LSR of grassland was more affected by climate than by RSR. Our results validated the species pool hypothesis in revealing that RSR had a significant role in shaping LSR patterns in addition to climate. We concluded that the relative effects of climate vs. RSR on LSR differed markedly between the forest and grassland communities across Xinjiang. Our results also showed that RSR revealed a contrasting relationship with soil pH in mountains and in basins, which might reflect differences in evolutionary processes of various habitats. In summary, our research systematically analyzed the correlation of species richness in regional and local scales in Xinjiang which provides more insights into the understanding of species pool hypothesis.

Dataset Information

Environmental determinants of woody plant diversity at a regional scale in China.

Publications

Environmental determinants of woody plant diversity at a regional scale in China.

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