Shift from soil chemical to physical filters in assembling riparian floristic communities along a flooding stress gradient

Abstract

Understanding community assembly is a key issue in recognizing community succession and guiding the restoration of degraded ecosystems. Based on the stress-dominance hypothesis (SDH), along a gradient of increasing environmental stress, the relative importance of environmental filtering is supposed to be dominant but species interaction could be a minor process in assembling communities. However, this hypothesized model of the assembly-rule shift was equivocally supported by various studies. In this study, by examining riparian plant communities with the zonation distribution of species composition along a markedly contrast flooding-stress gradient, a general aim was to clarify whether assembly rules of the communities would be also sorted into the zonation pattern as expected by the SDH. Another aim was to identify how edaphic factors associate with the assembly processes. Firstly, we found that even under the distinct stress gradient, community assembly was not stratified into different rules as the SDH expected, but environmental filtering appeared as a dominant assembly process across the stress gradient. Secondly, although filtering holds as a dominant assembly rule, environmental filters were found different along the gradient. By disentangling the filters of edaphic attributes, we found that the filters significantly shifted from soil physical properties to chemical nutrients governing the filtering process along the gradient. This result revealed that, across the contrast gradient, the environmental deterministic process on assembly is so strong that the other assembly processes became weaker. By synthesizing our results, the SDH may not be applied even under the context of a contrast stress gradient, which suggests that environmental context may be a key in testing and applying the SDH. Finally, in guiding riparian restoration under strong stress, we suggest that soil physical structure rather than chemical nutrients shall be given a priority for consideration in rebuilding the degraded riparian communities.