The environment, not space, dominantly structures the landscape patterns of the richness and composition of the tropical understory vegetation

Yue-Hua Hu; Da-Yong Sheng; Yang-Zhou Xiang; Zeng-Jiang Yang; Da-Ping Xu; Ning-Nan Zhang; Lei-Lei Shi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0081308

The environment, not space, dominantly structures the landscape patterns of the richness and composition of the tropical understory vegetation

PLoS One. 2013 Nov 22;8(11):e81308. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081308. eCollection 2013.

Authors

Yue-Hua Hu¹, Da-Yong Sheng, Yang-Zhou Xiang, Zeng-Jiang Yang, Da-Ping Xu, Ning-Nan Zhang, Lei-Lei Shi

Affiliation

¹ Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mengla, Yunnan, China ; Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.

Abstract

The mechanisms driving the spatial patterns of species richness and composition are essential to the understanding of biodiversity. Numerous studies separately identify the contributions of the environment (niche process) and space (neutral process) to the species richness or composition at different scales, but few studies have investigated the contributions of both types of processes in the two types of data at the landscape scale. In this study, we partitioned the spatial variations in all, exotic and native understory plant species richness and composition constrained by environmental variables and space in 134 plots that were spread across 10 counties in Hainan Island in southern China. The 134 plots included 70 rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) plantation plots, 50 eucalyptus (Eucalyptus urophylla) plantation plots, and 14 secondary forest plots. RDA based variation partitioning was run to assess the contribution of environment and space to species richness and composition. The results showed that the environmental variables alone explained a large proportion of the variations in both the species richness and composition of all, native, and exotic species. The RDA results indicated that overstory composition (forest type here) plays a leading role in determining species richness and composition patterns. The alpha and beta diversities of the secondary forest plots were markedly higher than that of the two plantations. In conclusion, niche differentiation processes are the principal mechanisms that shape the alpha and beta diversities of understory plant species in Hainan Island.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Biodiversity*
China
Ecosystem
Environment*
Forests
Geography
Islands
Plants*
Trees

Grants and funding

This study was supported by grants from the National Science and Technology Pillar Program for the Research and Demonstration of Sustainable Management Technology of Fast Growing Eucalyptus and Acacia Pulp Plantations (2006BAD32B02), by the Monitoring Program of Ecological and Environmental Impact of Eucalyptus Plantation of the Hainan Jinhua Forestry Limited Company, and by the West Light Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to Yue-Hua Hu. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all of the PLOS ONE policies on the sharing of data and materials. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.