Abstract
Climate, topography, and tree structure have different effects on plant diversity that vary with spatial scale. In this study, we assessed the contribution of these drivers and how they affect the vascular plant richness of different functional groups in a temperate forest ecosystem in Northeast China. We investigated about 0.986 million plants from 3160 sites to quantify the impact of annual mean temperature, sunshine duration, annual precipitation, standard deviation of diameter at breast height, and forest type on richness of vascular plants (total species, tree, treelet, shrub, and herb, separately) using the gradient boosting model. The results show that annual mean temperature had the strongest impact on plant richness. The tree richness peaked at intermediate annual mean temperature and sunshine duration and increased with annual precipitation. The Shannon diversity index and Simpson dominance index increased with annual precipitation and standard deviation of diameter at breast height, decreased with sunshine duration, and peaked at intermediate annual mean temperature and forest type. The total richness and understory richness increased with annual mean temperature and standard deviation of diameter at breast height and peaked at intermediate sunshine duration and annual precipitation. A comprehensive mechanism was found to regulate the plant diversity in forest ecosystems. The relationship between tree richness and annual mean temperature with latitudinal effect could be affected by the differences in number and size of tree individuals, indicating that plant diversity varies with the utilization of energy. The force driving plant richness varied with the functional group due to the different environmental resource requirements and the life history strategies of plants layers.
Highlights
One of the earliest and most fundamental topics in both biology and ecology is the determination of species diversity [1,2,3,4,5], due to its importance for biodiversity conservation and the sustainable use and planning of nature reserves and forest management [6]
Our findings illustrate that plant species richness is mainly regulated by temperature and sunlight, followed by diameter at breast height (DBH) (SD) on a regional scale
Plant richness varies with sunshine duration in an optimal range
Summary
One of the earliest and most fundamental topics in both biology and ecology is the determination of species diversity [1,2,3,4,5], due to its importance for biodiversity conservation and the sustainable use and planning of nature reserves and forest management [6]. Other studies have suggested that cold temperatures may possibly be responsible for maintenance of the high species richness observed in some areas [27,28]; e.g., a greater plant diversity has been observed at cooler sites compared to warmer sites in near region [29,30,31]. This indicates that other factors impact the latitude effect at the regional scale. The influence of sunshine duration and sunlight intensity on primary productivity and productivity on diversity have been widely recognized [32,33,34,35,36,37], whereas the relative importance of sunshine duration on diversity remains unclear
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