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Dryad

Data and code for: Functional traits mediate individualistic species-environment distributions at broad spatial scales while fine-scale species’ associations remain unpredictable

Data files

Nov 23, 2022 version files 115.17 MB

Abstract

Ecological communities are structured by a diverse set of processes acting at different spatial scales. In plant communities, assembly processes like ecological sorting, limiting similarity, and stochastic events are all expected to influence plant distributions and co-occurrence patterns. We assembled a data set describing the distribution of 139 herbaceous plant species within and among 257 forest stands in Wisconsin (USA) to elucidate the spatial scales at which these assembly processes operate. Analyses of these data in conjunction with detailed information about environmental conditions, plant functional traits, and phylogenetic relationships provided new insights into the scale-dependent drivers of plant community assembly in temperate forest understories. Traits like leaf height, specific leaf area, and seed mass all influenced individualistic plant distributions along landscape-scale gradients in soil texture, soil fertility, light availability, and climate while phylogenetic relationships did not predict species-environment relationships. These findings point to the importance of trait-mediated ecological sorting in shaping individualistic plant distributions at broad spatial scales. Contrary to our expectations about the importance of limiting similarity at local scales, neither functionally similar nor phylogenetically related herbs segregated among microsites within forest stands. We hypothesize strong ecological sorting among forest stands coupled with stochastic fine-scale interactions among species appear deterministic, niche-based assembly processes at local scales.