Abstract
AbstractThis study evaluated the relationship between the productivity of aboveground coarse woody biomass and species richness at individual species and community levels in two large and fully stem‐mapped temperate forest plots in northeastern China. Although productivity–diversity relationships (PDRs) have been investigated for different forest ecosystems, specific patterns have rarely been documented for individual species. In our study, the PDR patterns were found to be scale dependent at the community level in both research forests. Productivity is positively linked with species richness at the 20 × 20 m sampling scale. At the 40 × 40 m scale, however, significantly positive PDRs were only observed in the mature forest. A summary statistic combining both productivity and richness characteristics was used to investigate whether and at which spatial scale individual species show positive, negative, or neutral PDRs. The results show that 66.7% of all focal species exhibited positive or negative PDRs in the near‐mature forest, while 64.3% exhibited positive or negative PDRs in the mature forest. Contrary to expectations, there were few species showing positive PDRs in either forest. PDR patterns were found to be scale dependent in both forest types: Negative PDRs dominate at close neighborhoods in the near‐mature forest, while both positive and negative PDRs were found in the mature forest. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis that evaluates the PDRs of individual species based on facilitative and competitive effects in their neighborhoods.
Highlights
The relationship between productivity and diversity (PDR) has generated much interest
At the 40 × 40 m scale, a significantly positive PDR was only observed in the mature forest (MF) plot (R2 = 0.63, P < 0.01)
To examine the possible impacts of habitat differentiation, the PDR patterns were evaluated in the four different habitat areas of the near-m ature forest (NMF) plot
Summary
The relationship between productivity and diversity (PDR) has generated much interest. It has not been possible to establish general patterns and principles that are valid for different forest communities. The prevailing viewpoint is that productivity is unimodally correlated with species diversity (Goldberg and Miller 1990, Wilson and Tilman 1991). Underlying mechanisms driving the PDRs remain largely unexplored, they have primarily been explained by a “compensation hypothesis” and a “sampling effect hypothesis” (Loreau and Hector 2001). The compensation hypothesis claims that species richness contributes to an increase in forest productivity because of niche differentiation and interspecific facilitations
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