Abstract
Recently correlations between spatial species and size diversity have been found in many forest ecosystems around the world. They are likely to play a prominent role in nature's mechanisms of maintaining species and size diversity. In this study, we analysed the species population means of spatial species-mingling and size-inequality indices in 36 large forest monitoring plots from the temperate and subtropical zones in China. Based on the literature we included eleven diversity-index combinations and considered their correlations for increasing numbers of nearest neighbours. Generally, positive correlations are related to between-species population size differences whilst negative correlations reflect within-species population size differences. Our results showed that the selected species-mingling and size-inequality indices produced different correlation patterns in one and the same monitoring site. We therefore defined a species-mingling size-inequality correlation space by computing the 0.025 and the 0.975 quantiles from the correlation data of the eleven index combinations. We noticed that each observed correlation space included 1–3 combinations of five basic geometric types and can be interpreted as the unique signature of a forest ecosystem in time. The correlation space allowed us to understand more clearly at which spatial scale within-species correlation was more influential than between-species inequality and vice versa. The shape of the correlation space is interpretable and gives important clues about the forest development stage of a forest ecosystem.
Highlights
Studying species diversity for a very long time has been the most prominent direction of biodiversity research (Gaston and Spicer, 2004)
In pursuit of a better understanding of these natural mechanisms, we analysed correlations between species population means of spatial species and size diversity that coexist in the same woodland. 36 large monitoring plots from China with a minimum of 9 and a maximum of 86 species were examined for these correlations
We learned that the interaction between conspecific and het erospecific size structure plays a crucial role in these correlations (Wang et al, 2020; Pommerening et al, 2020a,2021): Positive correlations between spatial species mingling and size inequality imply that speci mens of different species mingle at that spatial scale that have very different sizes whilst the sizes within specimens of the same species do not differ much
Summary
Studying species diversity for a very long time has been the most prominent direction of biodiversity research (Gaston and Spicer, 2004). It turned out to be even more insightful to analyse species and size diversity jointly: Pommerening and Uria-Diez (2017) and Wang et al (2018) independently discovered that in many forest ecosystems larger trees often tend to be surrounded by tree species different from their own and termed this the mingling-size hypothesis. This discovery provided incentives to study spatial species-size correlations in greater detail in order to understand more clearly how species and size diversity are maintained naturally. The points were defined as stem-centre coordinates of trees and the species and size information constituted so-called marks (Pommerening and Grabarnik, 2019), i.e. additional information associated with the points which may help to explain the point pattern
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