Relationship between Wetland Plant Communities and Environmental Factors in the Tumen River Basin in Northeast China

Abstract

Understanding what controls wetland vegetation community composition is vital to conservation and biodiversity management. This study investigates the factors that affect wetland plant communities and distribution in the Tumen River Basin, Northeast China, an internationally important wetland for biodiversity conservation. We recorded floristic composition of herbaceous plants, soil properties, and microclimatic variables in 177, 1 × 1 m 2 quadrats at 45 sites, located upstream (26), midstream (12), and downstream (7) of the Basin. We used TWINSPAN to define vegetation communities and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) to examine the relationships between environmental and biological factors within the wetland plant communities. We recorded 100 plant species from 93 genera and 40 families in the upstream, 100 plant species from 57 genera and 31 families in the midstream, and 85 plant species from 76 genera and 38 families in the downstream. Higher species richness was recorded upstream of the River Basin. The plant communities and distribution were influenced by elevation, soil properties (total potassium, pH, and available phosphorus), and microclimate variables (surface temperature, precipitation, average temperature, sunshine hours, and relative humidity). More than any other factor, according to our results, elevation strongly influenced the structure of wetland plant communities. These findings support prevailing models describing the distribution of wetland plants along environmental gradients. The determination of the relationship between soil and plants is a useful way to better understand the ecosystem condition and can help manage the wetland ecosystem.

Shrinking Habitats and Native Species Loss Under Climate Change: A Multifactorial Risk Assessment of China's Inland Wetlands

“…Spatial soil nutrient gradients have been widely reported to shape the distribution and composition of wetland vegetation communities (Graham & Mendelssohn, 2016;Ma et al, 2021;Zheng et al, 2019), and unsurprisingly, we found that soil organic carbon, nitrogen, and pH, three variables closely related to soil nutrient availability to wetland plants, were the most important soil factors to species suitability in wetlands. Specifically, nitrogen is the predominant limiting nutrient that regulates plant growth and productivity of wetland ecosystems (Bai et al, 2012;Mitsch & Gosselink, 2015;Olde Venterink et al, 2001), and pH not only impacts directly on plant physiological processes, but also influences the availability and toxicity of certain critical elements for wetland plants, such as phosphorus, potassium, iron, and sulfur (Cheng et al, 2020;Mitsch & Gosselink, 2015;Tercero et al, 2015).…”

“…Simultaneously, wetland vegetation is particularly susceptible to changes of key environmental elements in wetlands (e.g., water table depth, nutrient conditions) that could be directly and indirectly induced by human activities and climate change (Ficken et al., 2019; Short et al., 2016). Thus, proper wetland protection requires understanding the relationships between the spatial patterns of wetland plant species and their environment, and how future environmental changes potentially alter species suitability in wetlands (Moor et al., 2015; Short et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2019). Generally, climatic factors, especially factors controlling water supply and seasonal hydrologic pulsing of wetlands (e.g., precipitation of the growing season, snowfall, isothermality), are recognized to be central in governing wetland species distributions at larger geographical scales (Garris et al., 2015; Xue et al., 2018; Zhong et al., 2021).…”

Using Multisource Geospatial Data to Identify Potential Wetland Rehabilitation Areas: A Pilot Study in China’s Sanjiang Plain

“…Previous researchers [33][34][35] concluded that the protection efficiency of the WNNR in NEC needs to be improved. According to legislation for WNNR, no agricultural activities are allowed in the national protected areas.…”

Giants of the Amazon: How does environmental variation drive the diversity patterns of large trees?

“…Positive relationships between plant diversity and environmental factors are common in various vegetation types (Balvanera & Aguirre, 2006; Beck et al, 2011; Slik et al, 2009; Zheng et al, 2019) and ecological gradients (Maharjan et al, 2021; Song et al, 2021; Tolmos et al, 2022; Venter et al, 2017; Wittmann et al, 2006). The available remote sensing environmental data provide spatially refined information on landscape and vegetation heterogeneity over the Amazon basin that can be readily incorporated into spatial models to study diversity distribution patterns.…”