Changes in community phylogenetic structure in a North American forest chronosequence

Abstract

Citation: Pastore, A. I., and B. P. Scherer. 2016. Changes in community phylogenetic structure in a North American forest chronosequence. Ecosphere 7(12):e01592. 10.1002/ecs2.1592Abstract. Several studies of succession in tropical and subtropical climates include phylogenetic analyses of the plant communities; the majority of these studies find a shift from more closely related to less closely related assemblages over succession. It has been suggested that this pattern indicates a shift from abiotic to biotic filters structuring communities over time, but there is considerable debate surrounding this interpretation. Conducting analyses for multiple components of plant assemblages can provide insight into the processes structuring communities. Here, we present community phylogenetic analyses of a deciduous forest chronosequence for three community components: standing vegetation, seed bank, and vegetation regenerated after small-scale disturbance. We constructed a phylogeny from 228 taxa present in the community data of a chronosequence obtained from previously published research. In the standing vegetation, we found a shift from more closely related to less closely related vegetation over the chronosequence. These results are consistent with other studies of chronosequences in tropical forests, lending support to the ubiquity of such shifts in relatedness over succession under different climatic conditions. However, the seed bank and vegetation regenerated after small-scale disturbance showed no consistent pattern with stand age, suggesting recruits are experiencing different forces than surrounding vegetation. These phylogenetic analyses of seed banks and vegetation regenerated after small-scale disturbance over a chronosequence provide additional evidence into the mechanisms driving forest succession.

Individual‐based models of community assembly: Neighbourhood competition drives phylogenetic community structure

“…This prediction was consistent with that of Mayfield and Levine (). Actual field studies, however, have often found shifts from more closely related (functionally similar) to less closely related (dissimilar) species assemblages during succession (Letcher, ; Li, Cadotte, Meiners, Hua, Jiang, et al, ; Shooner et al, ; Pastore & Scherer, ; reviewed in Meiners et al, ). There are several potential explanations for this discrepancy between the prediction and observations.…”

“…There are several potential explanations for this discrepancy between the prediction and observations. One possibility is that the systems had not reached a competitive equilibrium at the time of the aforementioned studies (Letcher, 2010;Li, Cadotte, Meiners, Hua, Jiang, et al, 2015;Pastore & Scherer, 2016;Shooner et al, 2015). For example, despite their analysis of 50 years of successional data, Li, Cadotte, Meiners, Hua, Jiang, et al (2015) found that their plots transitioned from meadows to early secondary forests, and this ecosystem would likely require many more decades to truly reach equilibrium (however, note that this limitation was reasonable because their main focus was on understanding the change in community patterns during succession, not the equilibrium pattern per se).…”

“…Although many observational studies have reported the appearance of significant community patterns during succession (Letcher, ; Letten, Keith, & Tozer, ; Pastore & Scherer, ), theories of community assembly have typically assumed competitive equilibrium (as suggested by Gerhold et al, ), leaving a gap between theory and reality. In this study, we re‐examined community assembly theory with a focus on individual‐level competition and colonisation, as well as the trade‐off between them.…”

“…Diamond, 1975;Webb et al, 2002;Mayfield & Levine, 2010) or a large-scale research plot is divided into quadrats (Kembel & Hubbell, 2006;Swenson et al, 2007;Yang et al, 2014). Studies based on the chronosequence approach often establish multiple quadrats across a successional gradient to obtain the set of local communities (Chai et al, 2016;Pastore & Scherer, 2016;Shooner, Chisholm, & Davies, 2015). In our analyses of the snapshot approach, we use a set of 100 local communities, generated by 100 simulations, at each of the distinct time steps (t = 5, 10, 15, …, 120) to create the null distribution.…”

Changes in soil and litter properties differentially influence soil nematode communities across three successional stages in two contrasting forests

“…The main reason is that dominant plant species are replaced during the plant succession and therefore soil organisms may be influenced by changes in plant communities caused by succession because plants can provide the basic resources for the soil food web (i.e., rhizodeposits, shoot and root litter; Bardgett & Wardle, 2010; Coleman et al, 2004). However, most previous studies on the succession have focused on the aboveground community responses (Liu et al, 2019; Pastore & Scherer, 2016; Teixeira et al, 2020), with less attention to belowground community (Gundale & Kardol, 2021; Yu et al, 2022).…”