Abstract
Mechanisms of plant community assembly at geographical scale are an interesting topic in ecology and biogeography, which are of great significance for the understanding of species coexistence and biodiversity conservation. But so far, only a few studies have simultaneously assessed the relative roles of multiple-scale factors in shaping phylogenetic and functional structure of plant communities at a macroecological scale. In this study, we linked modern climate, glacial-interglacial climate change and soil properties with phylogenetic and functional structure of shrub and herbaceous plant communities in Inner Mongolia, China, an arid and semi-arid region. Our results showed that functional structure of plant communities was more associated with modern climate and soil properties than phylogenetic structure, especially for the soil properties. Modern precipitation was found in all the combinations of variables that were most closely related to the community structure in this arid and semi-arid region. These findings suggest that phylogenetic and functional structure of biotic communities may be affected by processes at divergent spatial-temporal scales. That is, functional structure is better linked with modern and local factors, while phylogenetic structure is more associated with historical and 2 regional processes. This study highlights the importance of the associations between different biodiversity dimensions and divergent drivers.
Highlights
How plant communities are assembled at a geographical scale is an important topic in ecology and biogeography because it could provide insight into the knowledge of species coexistence and biodiversity conservation (Webb et al, 2002; Freilich and Connolly, 2015; Daniel et al, 2019)
Compared with the phylogenetic structure, the functional structure of both shrub and herbaceous communities showed clear patterns, i.e., functional clustering increased with decreasing precipitation from northeast to southwest (Figure 1)
The ordinary least squares models showed that the mean annual precipitation (MAP) always occurred in the three variables most associated with the phylogenetic and functional structure of both shrub and herbaceous communities (Figure 2 and Supplementary Table S1)
Summary
How plant communities are assembled at a geographical scale is an important topic in ecology and biogeography because it could provide insight into the knowledge of species coexistence and biodiversity conservation (Webb et al, 2002; Freilich and Connolly, 2015; Daniel et al, 2019). Community assembly is codetermined by factors at divergent spatiotemporal scales (Feng et al, 2014; Blonder et al, 2018; Kubota et al, 2018) Historical processes, such as geological events and paleoclimate change, could affect the biodiversity and community structure through their effects on species speciation, migration, and extinction (Svenning et al, 2015). Except for the phylogenetic structure, paleoclimate change may affect the functional structure of local communities by filtering the regional species pools based on climate-related traits (Ordonez and Svenning, 2015; Blonder et al, 2018). The functional diversity deficits of plant assemblages in Europe are positively associated with the glacial-interglacial climate instability (Ordonez and Svenning, 2015)
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