Functional Community Assembly is Increasingly Deterministic at Larger Spatial Grain Sizes
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Date
2018-04Author
Weiher, Evan R.
Wilke, Hayden
Susen, McKayla
Schafer, Tabitha M.
O'Keefe, Kerry
Nelsen, Karlee
Mares, Eryn
Ishihara, Charles
Graf, Kacie
Carlson, Elizabeth
Petersen, Molly
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Show full item recordAbstract
Community assembly is the result of ecological selection processes, dispersal processes, and
random drift processes (Vellend 2010). Selection processes can cause coexisting species to
be more similar or more different in traits, depending on the strength of environmental
filtering or resource partitioning.
Scale in terms of the spatial extent can influence how trait similarity differs from random
drift. For example, a grassland could have higher than expected trait diversity by having
tall, medium and short species in most samples. But if the scale is expanded to include
forests with tall trees, then the grassland plants may have lower than expected trait diversity
(Weiher and Keddy 1995).
Scale also includes the sample scale or grain size. We sampled the vegetation around
coexisting sedges at three grain sizes (0.1 m2, 1 m2, and 10 m2) to investigate if this aspect of
scale influences our conclusions about community assembly.
Subject
Posters
Sedge plants
Grasslands
Forest habitats
Permanent Link
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/79878Description
Color poster with text, images, and graphs.