Abstract
From supporting wood production to mitigating climate change, forest ecosystem services are crucial to the well-being of humans. Understanding the mechanisms that drive forest dynamics can help us infer how to maintain forest ecosystem services and how to improve predictions of forest dynamics under climate change. Despite the growing number of studies exploring above ground biomass (AGB) dynamics, questions of dynamics in biodiversity and in number of individuals still remain unclear. Here, we first explored the patterns of community dynamics in different aspects (i.e., AGB, density and biodiversity) based on short-term (five years) data from a 25-ha permanent plot in a subtropical forest in central China. Second, we examined the relationships between community dynamics and biodiversity and functional traits. Third, we identified the key factors affecting different aspects of community dynamics and quantified their relative contributions. We found that in the short term (five years), net above ground biomass change (ΔAGB) and biodiversity increased, while the number of individuals decreased. Resource-conservation traits enhanced the ΔAGB and reduced the loss in individuals, while the resource-acquisition traits had the opposite effect. Furthermore, the community structure contributed the most to ΔAGB; topographic variables and soil nutrients contributed the most to the number of individuals; demographic process contributed the most to biodiversity. Our results indicate that biotic factors mostly affected the community dynamics of ΔAGB and biodiversity, while the number of individuals was mainly shaped by abiotic factors. Our work highlighted that the factors influencing different aspects of community dynamics vary. Therefore, forest management practices should be formulated according to a specific protective purpose.
Highlights
The forest ecosystem, accounting for over 70% terrestrial biomass, supports high levels of global terrestrial biodiversity [1,2,3]
We addressed the following three major questions: (1) What is the pattern of community dynamics in this subtropical forest, and is there a significant difference among different topographic conditions? (2) How do biodiversity and functional traits affect the community dynamics in species-rich subtropical forests, and does the effect differ among different aspects of community dynamics? and (3) What are the key influencing factors on the three aspects of community dynamics, and what are their relative contributions?
Our results showed that recruitment had a positive effect on ∆S, which suggests that recruits play a key role in enhancing forest biodiversity and that future protective practices should focus on young trees as well as adults to improve biodiversity
Summary
The forest ecosystem, accounting for over 70% terrestrial biomass, supports high levels of global terrestrial biodiversity [1,2,3]. The dynamics of above ground biomass (AGB, an important ecosystem function) in forests have been well-studied [8,9,10,11], confirming the effect of both biotic factors (e.g., biodiversity, functional traits) and abiotic factors (e.g., topographic variables, soil nutrients) on AGB dynamics. These studies only investigated one aspect of forest dynamics, so do not provide enough information for readers to understand how forest ecosystem services and functions will respond to climate change altogether. One experiment in a Minnesota grassland showed that the above ground biomass increased significantly after nitrogen addition, diversity decreased, and reduced the stability in grassland ecosystem function [15]
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