Abstract
Species respond to changes in their environments. A core goal in ecology is to understand the process of plant community assembly in response to a changing climate. Examining the performance of functional traits and trait-based assembly patterns across species among different growth forms is a useful way to explore the assembly process. In this study, we constructed a habitat severity gradient including several environment factors along a 2300 m wide elevational range at Taibai Mountain, central China. Then we assessed the shift on functional trait values and community assembly patterns along this gradient across species among different growth forms. We found that (1) although habitat-severity values closely covaried with elevation in this study, an examined communities along a habitat severity gradient might reveal community dynamics and species responses under future climate change. (2) the occurrence of trait values along the habitat severity gradient across different growth forms were similar, whereas the assembly pattern of herbaceous species was inconsistent with the community and woody species. (3) the trait-trait relationships of herbaceous species were dissimilar to those of the community and woody species. These results suggest that (1) community would re-assemble along habitat severity gradient through environmental filtering, regardless of any growth forms and that (2) different growth forms' species exhibiting similar trait values' shift but different trait-trait relationship by different trait combinations.
Highlights
The climate acts as a filter for the species pool on a regional scale (Southwood, 1988), as it shifts the interactions of plant species (Chapin et al, 1998), as well as the community assembly process
The plant responses to environmental gradients seems to be a result of habitat severity, which links to the environmental filtering effect (Díaz et al, 1999)
Our Habitat severity values (HV) is strongly correlated with elevation (Appendix Table 3), and the correlations between HV and traits are similar to those between elevation and traits; this suggests that elevation might replace habitat severity in regions with a wide range of elevations but short geographic distances
Summary
The climate acts as a filter for the species pool on a regional scale (Southwood, 1988), as it shifts the interactions of plant species (Chapin et al, 1998), as well as the community assembly process. Plant functional traits and their value’s distribution patterns have become proxies for examining the plant community assembly process (Grabherr et al, 1994; Díaz et al, 1999, 2007; Mcgill et al, 2006; Vittoz et al, 2008; Walther et al, 2009; Mason and de Bello, 2013; Yablon, 2013). Response traits provide information on the physiological adaptations of vegetation to various environmental gradients (McIntyre et al, 1999; de Bello et al, 2005; May et al, 2013; Purcell, 2016) These processes are believed to shape the range of functional trait values within communities (Cornwell and Ackerly, 2009) through habitat filtering or interspecific competition. The SES of traits observed value to null expectation value (Kraft et al, 2009; Kraft and Ackerly, 2010)
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