Community dissimilarity of angiosperm trees reveals deep‐time diversification across tropical and temperate forests

Abstract

Question: To better understand the influence of deep-time diversification on extant plant communities, we assessed how community dissimilarity increases with spatial and climatic distances at multiple taxonomic ranks (species, genus, family, and order) in angiosperm trees. We tested the prediction that the dissimilarity-distance relationship should change across taxonomic ranks depending on the deep-time diversification in different biogeographical regions reflecting geohistories and geographical settings. Location: Global.Methods: Using a data set of plot-based surveys across the globe (861 plots), we compiled a community composition matrix comprising 21,455 species, 2,741 genera, 240 families, and 57 orders. We then calculated Sørensen's pairwise dissimilarity (β sor ), and its turnover (β sim ) and nestedness (β sne ) components, among plots within seven biogeographical regions. Finally, we modeled the relationships between the biotic dissimilarities and the spatial/climatic distances at each taxonomic rank, and compared them among regions.Results: β sor and β sim increased with increasing spatial and climatic distance in all biogeographical regions: β sim was dominant in all biogeographical regions in general, while β sne showed relatively high contributions to total dissimilarity in the temperate regions with historically unstable climatic conditions. The β sim -distance curve was more saturated at smaller spatial scales in the tropics than in the temperate regions.In general, the curves became flatter at higher taxonomic ranks (order or family), with the exception of Africa, North America, and Australia, pointing to region-specific geographical constraints.Conclusions: Compositional dissimilarity was generally shaped through the abrupt turnover of species along spatial/climatic gradients. The relatively high importance of the nestedness component in the temperate regions suggests that historical dispersal filters related to extinction/colonization may play important roles. Region-specific Journal of Vegetation ScienceBUNTAROU eT Al.

Beta diversity dynamics in East Asian angiosperm woody plants: taxonomic turnover in relation to temperature gradients during the Cenozoic

“…We modeled the relationship between genus turnover and inter-assemblage geographical/climatic distances in each geological time interval. In the regression analysis, we used negative exponential and power-law functions (Nekola and McGill 2014), fitted using generalized linear modeling with a Gaussian distribution and logistic regression (Kusumoto et al 2021). We conducted model comparison with Akaike's Information Criterion that showed similar fits, and thus reported the results of the negative exponential model (see Appendix S8).…”

Macroecology of vegetation — Lessons learnt from the Virtual Special Issue

“…For plants, this Special Issue demonstrates that many studies and large initiatives have addressed this gap since then. A total of 15 contributions used fine‐grain plant community data to address macroecological questions at various extents: global (Kusumoto et al, 2021; Testolin et al, 2021), across the whole Palaearctic (Biurrun et al, 2021; Dembicz et al, 2021; Zhang et al, 2021), across Europe (Axmanová et al, 2021; Boonman et al, 2021; Padullés Cubino et al, 2021; Sporbert et al, 2021; Večera et al, 2021), larger parts of Europe (Cao Pinna et al, 2021; Wagner et al, 2021) or at state level (Bourgeois et al, 2021; Craven et al, 2021). Most of these studies rely on two large vegetation‐plot databases established and maintained by two working groups of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), the European Vegetation Archive (EVA; Chytrý et al, 2016) by the European Vegetation Survey (Axmanová et al, 2021; Boonman et al, 2021; Cao Pinna et al, 2021; Padullés Cubino et al, 2021; Sporbert et al, 2021; Večera et al, 2021; Wagner et al, 2021) and the GrassPlot database (Dengler et al, 2018) by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (Biurrun et al, 2021; Dembicz et al, 2021; Zhang et al, 2021).…”

“…Most of these studies rely on two large vegetation‐plot databases established and maintained by two working groups of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), the European Vegetation Archive (EVA; Chytrý et al, 2016) by the European Vegetation Survey (Axmanová et al, 2021; Boonman et al, 2021; Cao Pinna et al, 2021; Padullés Cubino et al, 2021; Sporbert et al, 2021; Večera et al, 2021; Wagner et al, 2021) and the GrassPlot database (Dengler et al, 2018) by the Eurasian Dry Grassland Group (Biurrun et al, 2021; Dembicz et al, 2021; Zhang et al, 2021). Testolin et al (2021) used data from the global vegetation‐plot database sPlot (Bruelheide et al, 2019), and four relied on regional data compilations (Bourgeois et al, 2021; Craven et al, 2021; Kusumoto et al, 2021; Tordoni et al, 2021). This pattern highlights that community efforts of collating extensive collaborative vegetation‐plot databases, such as EVA, sPlot and GrassPlot, have the potential to facilitate new research avenues (Bruelheide et al, 2019; Dengler et al, 2011; Wiser, 2016), often beyond the initial scopes imagined by the founders of these databases, not mentioning the aims of most original field workers.…”

“…However, the higher phylogenetic turnover at the margins of the beech distribution remained even after controlling for species turnover, indicating that species typical of other forest types might be present there. Kusumoto et al (2021) had a similar approach to analyze the beta diversity of angiosperm tree communities across the globe. They compared taxonomic diversity at four taxonomic resolutions (species, genus, family, order).…”

Species Abundance Distributions Patterns between Tiankeng Forests and Nearby Non-Tiankeng Forests in Southwest China

“…At present, two major theories have been advanced to explain the rules of community assembly mechanisms. Niche theory Diversity 2022, 14, 64 2 of 13 proposes that species diversity is affected by deterministic processes, such as environment filtering, competition, and exclusion within species [2][3][4], while neutral theory emphasizes the effect of random processes, such as diffusion limitation on the composition and distribution of species, distance decay, and species turnover rate [5][6][7]. Species abundance distribution (SAD), the basic proportional abundance of species combined in an ecological community, is one of the important ways to encapsulate the characteristics of community diversity [8,9].…”