Abstract
Information on the maintenance of diversity patterns from regional to local scales is dispersed among academic fields due to the local focus of community ecology. To better understand these patterns, the study of ecological communities needs to be expanded to larger scales and the various processes affecting them need to be integrated using a suitable quantitative method. We determined a range of communities on a flora-subregional scale in Yunnan province, China (383210.02 km2). A series of species pools were delimited from the regional to plot scales. Plant diversity was evaluated and abiotic and biotic processes identified at each pool level. The species pool effect was calculated using an innovative model, and the contribution of these processes to the maintenance of plant species diversity was determined and integrated: climate had the greatest effect at the flora-subregional scale, with historical and evolutionary processes contributing ∼11%; climate and human disturbance had the greatest effect at the local site pool scale; competition exclusion and stress limitation explained strong filtering at the successional stage pool scale; biotic processes contributed more on the local community scale than on the regional scale. Scale expansion combined with the filtering model approach solves the local problem in community ecology.
Highlights
The maintenance of biodiversity patterns is a core issue in community ecology due to the high extinction rate of global biodiversity [1,2,3]
(2) The expanded community included the flora subregion itself, a local site, and a traditional community. These hierarchical ecosystems were defined as flora subregion, local site, and community species pools; the plant species in the flora subregional pool immigrated from the Yunnan flora region pool, those in the local pool from the flora subregional pool, and those in a specific community from the local site pool according to species pool theory [8, 24, 25]
We considered that the filtering between the Yunnan flora region pool and the Yunnnan flora subregion pools was dictated by land area, diversity of climate, landform, vegetation, and HE processes at the Yunnan flora subregional level to create the different diversities in these flora subregions (Table 2 and Figure 2)
Summary
The maintenance of biodiversity patterns is a core issue in community ecology due to the high extinction rate of global biodiversity [1,2,3]. Other ecologists and conservationists have conducted much recent research on the maintenance of plant community diversity, focusing on assessing the relative importance of regional and local processes [8,9,10]. These studies generally make use of statistical approaches, such as multiple regression or structural equation modeling, and experimental approaches linking species pool theory, to study the importance of local and regional processes [11]. The community ecologist works to explain species coexistence on a local scale Those ecologists and conservationists who consider multiple-scale processes have greatly improved our ability to explain variation in diversity [12]. Ricklefs [20] suggested that the patterns of diversity represent the regional buildup, loss, and sorting of species within a region and that considering the community as a local, interacting assemblage of species that cannot be inclusive of the populations of its component species has hindered progress toward understanding plant diversity on local to regional scales
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