Joint effects of environmental filtering and dispersal limitation on the species assemblage of the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Aim: Mountains harbour a rich and non-random cluster of species, yet knowledge of the species' biological attributes that support their coexistence in the montane community is limited. Here, we investigated the association of species occurrence on the Tibetan Plateau with their morphological, ecological or evolutionary constraints. Location: Tibetan Plateau (TP).Taxon: Mammals and birds. Methods:We tested whether species occurrence on the TP correlates with morphological, ecological or evolutionary constraints using the spatial distribution, phylogeny, dispersal ability and thermal niche property data for 1353 terrestrial vertebrates (383 mammals and 970 birds). We used standard (non-phylogenetic) and phylogenetic logistic regressions to elucidate the relative contributions of these attributes of species to explaining their occurrence on the TP. We assessed the geographical patterns of the community structures on the TP and fitted linear mixed models to explore the underlying eco-evolutionary forces. Results:The TP species exhibited a higher cold tolerance, wider thermal niche breadth and higher rate of niche evolution than non-TP species. We supported the assumption that the TP species were not a random subset from the species pool, but were structured jointly by environmental filtering and dispersal limitation. While dispersal and ecological processes underlying species assemblages varied spatially and among taxa, we found that species in stressful environments were limited by environmental filtering, whereas dispersal limitation was more pronounced under favourable climatic conditions.Main conclusions: Our study finds that environmental filtering and dispersal limitation jointly shape the species assemblage on the TP. These findings provide significant insights into community assembly processes on the TP and other montane ecosystems on Earth, especially those that are sensitive to global warming.

Seasonal succession of microbial community co-occurrence patterns and community assembly mechanism in coal mining subsidence lakes

“…In the subsidence lake during summer, the contribution of the deterministic mechanisms on impacting the bacterial community was small, demonstrating that the stochastic mechanisms were more crucial (Figure 5B). This was consistent with what had been found in previous plateau lakes, which found that the increased temperature in summer promoted microbial metabolic rates, thereby increasing the randomness of speciation and death (He et al, 2022). Concurrently, the increasing relative importance of stochastic processes in summer was well associated with higher nutrient contents.…”

“…Among the winter and summer, bacterial community similarity exhibited a strong and significant relationship with physicochemical parameters (r = 0.65, p < 0.001; Supplementary Figure S4), and T explained 18.26% of the total community variations solely (Figure 4A), which is evidence for environmental filtering. The environmental stress on the temperature may boost the filtering out of communities with weak cold resistance and narrow niche breadth in winter (He et al, 2022). However, warm weather conditions were conducive to the growth of species and the maintenance of biodiversity (Wang et al, 2022b).…”

“…Therefore, environmental changes such as global warming may affect microbial assembly through regulating deterministic and stochastic processes (Zhu et al, 2020). Microbial community assembly mechanisms have been well explored in urban rivers (Zhang et al, 2019b;Niu et al, 2021), eutrophic lakes (Tang et al, 2021;Wan et al, 2021), and soil ecosystems (He et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022a). The impact of environmental changes on microbial community assembly and interspecific interactions in subsidence lakes is still unclear.…”

Elevational patterns of amphibian functional and phylogenetic structures in eastern Nepal Himalaya

“…However, since it is the evolutionary history and functional traits that dominate the interactions between species, and between species and ecosystem functioning (Lavorel & Garnier, 2002; Mouchet et al, 2010; Webb, 2000), using species functional and phylogenetic structures to explore the maintenance of biodiversity is considered to be more reliable and “predictive” (Veron et al, 2019; Zakharova et al, 2019). Following this claim, an increasing number of ecologists started to explore the mechanisms of community assembly in different taxa and regions by using a combination of species’ functional and phylogenetic characteristics (He et al, 2022; Jarzyna et al, 2021; Montaño‐Centellas et al, 2021). However, these studies were concentrated on plants (Li et al, 2022; Xu et al, 2017; Zhang et al, 2021), birds (Du et al, 2021; Hanz et al, 2019) and small mammals (Kohli et al, 2021).…”

Diversity and distribution of fish in the Qilian Mountain Basin

“…Mountains play an important role in regional riverine ecosystems ( Viviroli et al 2007 , Anderson and Goulden 2011 ) and the formation of their biota is more sensitive than that of other areas to geological history ( Tang et al 2009 , He et al 2022 ). Mountain ecosystems, such as the QTP, characterised by the largest quantity of glaciers and known as the water tower of Asia, are the regions of origin and maintenance of a substantial fraction of rivers and plateau lakes ( Immerzeel et al 2020 ).…”