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Determinants of high mountain plant diversity in the Chilean Andes: From regional to local spatial scales.

ABSTRACT: Mountains are considered excellent natural laboratories for studying the determinants of plant diversity at contrasting spatial scales. To gain insights into how plant diversity is structured at different spatial scales, we surveyed high mountain plant communities in the Chilean Andes where man-driven perturbations are rare. This was done along elevational gradients located at different latitudes taking into account factors that act at fine scales, including abiotic (potential solar radiation and soil quality) and biotic (species interactions) factors, and considering multiple spatial scales. Species richness, inverse of Simpson's concentration (Dequiv), beta-diversity and plant cover were estimated using the percentage of cover per species recorded in 34 sites in the different regions with contrasted climates. Overall, plant species richness, Dequiv and plant cover were lower in sites located at higher latitudes. We found a unimodal relationship between species richness and elevation and this pattern was constant independently of the regional climatic conditions. Soil quality decreased the beta-diversity among the plots in each massif and increased the richness, the Dequiv and cover. Segregated patterns of species co-occurrence were related to increases in richness, Dequiv and plant cover at finer scales. Our results showed that elevation patterns of alpine plant diversity remained constant along the regions although the mechanisms underlying these diversity patterns may differ among climatic regions. They also suggested that the patterns of plant diversity in alpine ecosystems respond to a series of factors (abiotic and biotic) that act jointly at different spatial scale determining the assemblages of local communities, but their importance can only be assessed using a multi-scale spatial approach.

SUBMITTER: Lopez-Angulo J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6034847 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Determinants of high mountain plant diversity in the Chilean Andes: From regional to local spatial scales.

López-Angulo Jesús J Pescador David S DS Sánchez Ana M AM Mihoč Maritza A K MAK Cavieres Lohengrin A LA Escudero Adrián A

PloS one 20180706 7

Mountains are considered excellent natural laboratories for studying the determinants of plant diversity at contrasting spatial scales. To gain insights into how plant diversity is structured at different spatial scales, we surveyed high mountain plant communities in the Chilean Andes where man-driven perturbations are rare. This was done along elevational gradients located at different latitudes taking into account factors that act at fine scales, including abiotic (potential solar radiation an ...[more]

PMID: 29979767

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Project description:Biodiversity-benefits of organic farming have mostly been documented at the field scale. However, these benefits from organic farming to species diversity may not propagate to larger scales because variation in the management of different crop types and seminatural habitats in conventional farms might allow species to cope with intensive crop management. We studied flowering plant communities using a spatially replicated design in different habitats (cereal, ley and seminatural grasslands) in organic and conventional farms, distributed along a gradient in proportion of seminatural grasslands. We developed a novel method to compare the rates of species turnover within and between habitats, and between the total species pools in the two farming systems. We found that the intrahabitat species turnover did not differ between organic and conventional farms, but that organic farms had a significantly higher interhabitat turnover of flowering plant species compared with conventional ones. This was mainly driven by herbicide-sensitive species in cereal fields in organic farms, as these contained 2.5 times more species exclusive to cereal fields compared with conventional farms. The farm-scale species richness of flowering plants was higher in organic compared with conventional farms, but only in simple landscapes. At the interfarm level, we found that 36% of species were shared between the two farming systems, 37% were specific to organic farms whereas 27% were specific to conventional ones. Therefore, our results suggest that that both community nestedness and species turnover drive changes in species composition between the two farming systems. These large-scale shifts in species composition were driven by both species-specific herbicide and nitrogen sensitivity of plants. Our study demonstrates that organic farming should foster a diversity of flowering plant species from local to landscape scales, by promoting unique sets of arable-adapted species that are scarce in conventional systems. In terms of biodiversity conservation, our results call for promoting organic farming over large spatial extents, especially in simple landscapes, where such transitions would benefit plant diversity most.

Dataset Information

Determinants of high mountain plant diversity in the Chilean Andes: From regional to local spatial scales.

Publications

Determinants of high mountain plant diversity in the Chilean Andes: From regional to local spatial scales.

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