Abstract
Understanding the effect of nitrogen addition on species trait–abundance relationships is one of the central focuses of community ecology and can offer us insights into the mechanisms of community assembly under atmospheric nitrogen deposition. However, few studies have focused on desert ecosystems. In this study, we measured the abundance and ecological stoichiometric traits, leaf carbon content (LCC), nitrogen content (LNC), and phosphorus content (LPC) for all annual ephemerals in all plots subjected to nitrogen addition in early spring in Gurbantunggut Desert, northern Xinjiang, China. We found a significant relationship between traits (LNC, N:P, and C:N) and abundance, indicating that ecological stoichiometry is a good proxy for explaining and predicting species abundance. We further found that significant trait–abundance relationships still existed under different nitrogen addition levels. The result suggests that trait-based niche-assembly theory plays an important role in determining species abundance under atmospheric nitrogen deposition.
Highlights
Nitrogen Addition in GurbantunggutUnderstanding why some species are abundant and others are rare in a given site is one of the central foci of community ecology [1,2,3]
Irrespective of nitrogen addition, we found that the relative abundance of species was positively correlated with LNC (R2 = 0.71, p < 0.01) and N:P (R2 = 0.73, p < 0.01) but negatively correlated with C:N (R2 = 0.64, p < 0.01) (Figure 2)
We found that the ecological stoichiometric traits of a given species are a strong predictor of its abundance, and this relationship still exists under different nitrogen addition amounts
Summary
Nitrogen Addition in GurbantunggutUnderstanding why some species are abundant and others are rare in a given site is one of the central foci of community ecology [1,2,3]. Trait-based niche-assembly theory demonstrates that environmental filtering and limiting similarity act as a set of filters for local community assembly [4,5,6]; those filtering processes determine which species (according to their trait values) have a greater probability of being present and becoming dominant under specific environmental conditions [7,8,9,10]. If this is true, species traits and abundance will be linked to communities. Species are essentially ecologically equivalent, independently of their traits; there will be no correlation between species abundance and traits within communities
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