Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 11, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-01149-x
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- FEDER Funds through the Operational Competitiveness Factors Program -COMPETE
- National Funds through Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT)
- PMRG through CEEC Individual Programme [2020.03356.CEECIND]
- FCT [UIDB/00239/2020]
- [PTDC/BIA-ECO/28729/2017 -POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028729]
- [L57/2016/CP1440/CT0022]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study evaluated the impact of niche-based and neutral factors on changes in community similarity in riparian plant communities, with results supporting the continuum hypothesis, indicating that changes in community similarity are associated with environmental and neutral factors.
The distance decay of community similarity (DDCS) is a pattern that is widely observed in terrestrial and aquatic environments. Niche-based theories argue that species are sorted in space according to their ability to adapt to new environmental conditions. The ecological neutral theory argues that community similarity decays due to ecological drift. The continuum hypothesis provides an intermediate perspective between niche-based theories and the neutral theory, arguing that niche and neutral factors are at the opposite ends of a continuum that ranges from competitive to stochastic exclusion. We assessed the association between niche-based and neutral factors and changes in community similarity measured by Sorensen's index in riparian plant communities. We assessed the importance of neutral processes using network distances and flow connection and of niche-based processes using Strahler order differences and precipitation differences. We used a hierarchical Bayesian approach to determine which perspective is best supported by the results. We used dataset composed of 338 vegetation censuses from eleven river basins in continental Portugal. We observed that changes in Sorensen indices were associated with network distance, flow connection, Strahler order difference and precipitation difference but to different degrees. The results suggest that community similarity changes are associated with environmental and neutral factors, supporting the continuum hypothesis.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available