Abstract
Studies that test community assembly hypotheses in observational communities frequently evaluate patterns for plots or entire communities, yet studies that examine assembly patterns across spatial scales show that they are greatly influenced by scale. Here, we test the spatial dependency of patterns of relatedness and plant height for all individual herbaceous plants along five 40-m old-field transects (Southern Ontario, Canada). We identified each individual plant and measured its distance along the transect and its height, and we constructed a molecular phylogeny for all observed species. To uncover the scale at which community phylogenetic and trait similarities shift, we used partial Mantel correlograms and distance-based Moran Eigenvector Maps (dbMEMs). We found that communities shift from significantly overdispersed at relatively smaller scales (i.e., < 15 m) to spatially clustered at larger scales, showing that assembly mechanism influence depends on scale of observation. This pattern was observed for both phylogeny and height, but was the strongest when considering phylogeny only. These results reveal the importance of spatial scale when examining community phylogenetic or trait patterns, where finding support for one assembly mechanism at a single scale does not necessarily mean that other mechanisms are also not important for structuring community composition and diversity.
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Acknowledgements
We thank S.W. Livingstone and various volunteers for their help with fieldwork. MWC wishes to also acknowledge support from the endowed TD Chair of Urban Forest Conservation and Biology, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and Ontario Research Fund. We are extremely grateful to the thoughtful comments provided by two anonymous reviewers.
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Grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to MWC (#386151) and to MJF (#208300) funded this work.
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LSJ, MWC and MJF conceived of the project and designed the study. LSJ collected and analyzed the data. All authors contributed to writing and revising the manuscript.
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Communicated by Kendi Davies.
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Jin, L.S., Yin, D., Fortin, MJ. et al. The mechanisms generating community phylogenetic patterns change with spatial scale. Oecologia 193, 655–664 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04695-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04695-9