Multi-driver and multi-scale assessment of vine community structure and composition across a complex tropical environmental matrix.

Diana L Delgado,Carla Restrepo,Kai K Yue

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0215274

Abstract

Ecological communities are structured by multiple processes operating at multiple scales yet understanding the scale-dependency of these processes remains an open challenge. This might be particularly true for parasites, for which biotic rather than abiotic processes may play a primary role in structuring communities. Focusing on vines, a group of structural parasites that gain access to the canopy using different climbing mechanisms, we examined the influence of abiotic factors in tandem with host-parasite and parasite-parasite interactions in the assembly of tropical vine communities. Two synthetic variables, namely Climate1 and landscape Variety, were consistently important in explaining variation in species richness and diversity, as well as species composition, but their importance varied with scale. Whereas Climate1 summarizes the largest variability among climatic variables, landscape Variety expresses landscape heterogeneity within a neighborhood. Significant patterns of species co-occurrences suggest that vine-vine interactions also contribute to vine community assembly. Our results may be critical to understand vine proliferation and help design management strategies for their control.

Highlights

Ecological communities are structured by abiotic and biotic processes operating at multiple scales [1], yet understanding their scale-dependency remains an open challenge [2, 3]
One group of species for which this hierarchy of processes may not apply includes a broad spectrum of symbionts—ranging from mutualistic to parasitic species [7, 8]. Biotic processes such as host-parasite interactions may be more important than abiotic processes in determining the structure of parasite communities [7,8,9]
One abiotic (Climate1-summarizes the largest variability among temperature and precipitation variables) and one biotic variable were consistently important in explaining variation in species richness and diversity at small and medium scales, and species composition at medium scales

Summary

Introduction

Ecological communities are structured by abiotic and biotic processes operating at multiple scales [1], yet understanding their scale-dependency remains an open challenge [2, 3]. It is generally acknowledged that these processes operate in a hierarchical fashion to determine species’ distributions and the structure of ecological communities (e.g., [4, 5], but see [6]). Biotic processes such as host-parasite interactions may be more important than abiotic processes in determining the structure of parasite communities [7,8,9]. Parasite-parasite interactions may play a similar role [7, 10].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion