A conceptual model for linking traits to plant community assembly using experiments and simulations

Résumé fourni par la source

The prevailing understanding of plant community assembly is that external environmental factors act as filters, leading to the convergence of traits, and internal, biotic factors represented by plant-plant interactions generally lead to trait divergence to avoid competition. Here, we propose a conceptual model in which plant community assembly is driven by environmental filtering based on traits, and the feedback of communities on environmental factors generates fine-scale heterogeneity and spatial/temporal nesting among factors, affecting trait diversity. We argue that patterns appearing as generated by plant-plant interactions can emerge through environmental filtering driven by this feedback path. We then map promising synthetic and natural community experiments and simulation approaches into this conceptual model, identifying their strengths and limitations. While synthetic community experiments can focus on the effects of a target species mixture on the process of species extinctions and colonisations, natural community experiments can test hypotheses about community assembly by disrupting assembly processes through species removal or addition, alteration of resources, conditions, or disturbance. Furthermore, individual-based models can simulate plant community assembly to address questions about how plant traits, environmental factors and their interactions, and metacommunity-level factors, such as dispersal limitation, influence community composition and diversity.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.