Separating the Effects of Environment and Space on Tree Species Distribution: From Population to Community

50Citations
Citations of this article
103Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.

Abstract

Quantifying the relative contributions of environmental conditions and spatial factors to species distribution can help improve our understanding of the processes that drive diversity patterns. In this study, based on tree inventory, topography and soil data from a 20-ha stem-mapped permanent forest plot in Guangdong Province, China, we evaluated the influence of different ecological processes at different spatial scales using canonical redundancy analysis (RDA) at the community level and multiple linear regression at the species level. At the community level, the proportion of explained variation in species distribution increased with grid-cell sizes, primarily due to a monotonic increase in the explanatory power of environmental variables. At the species level, neither environmental nor spatial factors were important determinants of overstory species' distributions at small cell sizes. However, purely spatial variables explained most of the variation in the distributions of understory species at fine and intermediate cell sizes. Midstory species showed patterns that were intermediate between those of overstory and understory species. At the 20-m cell size, the influence of spatial factors was stronger for more dispersal-limited species, suggesting that much of the spatial structuring in this community can be explained by dispersal limitation. Comparing environmental factors, soil variables had higher explanatory power than did topography for species distribution. However, both topographic and edaphic variables were highly spatial structured. Our results suggested that dispersal limitation has an important influence on fine-intermediate scale (from several to tens of meters) species distribution, while environmental variability facilitates species distribution at intermediate (from ten to tens of meters) and broad (from tens to hundreds of meters) scales. © 2013 Lin et al.

References Powered by Scopus

Mechanisms of maintenance of species diversity

5181Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Ecologically meaningful transformations for ordination of species data

4320Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Partialling out the spatial component of ecological variation

3707Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Cited by Powered by Scopus

Seeing the forest from drones: Testing the potential of lightweight drones as a tool for long-term forest monitoring

238Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Soil organic carbon stocks and their determining factors in the Dano catchment (Southwest Burkina Faso)

89Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Tree aboveground carbon storage correlates with environmental gradients and functional diversity in a tropical forest

45Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Lin, G., Stralberg, D., Gong, G., Huang, Z., Ye, W., & Wu, L. (2013). Separating the Effects of Environment and Space on Tree Species Distribution: From Population to Community. PLoS ONE, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056171

Readers over time

‘13‘14‘15‘16‘17‘18‘19‘20‘21‘22‘23‘24‘250481216

Readers' Seniority

Tooltip

PhD / Post grad / Masters / Doc 40

59%

Researcher 19

28%

Professor / Associate Prof. 7

10%

Lecturer / Post doc 2

3%

Readers' Discipline

Tooltip

Agricultural and Biological Sciences 37

52%

Environmental Science 29

41%

Earth and Planetary Sciences 3

4%

Social Sciences 2

3%

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free
0