In this new post, Changjin Cheng—a PhD candidate from the School of Ecology and Nature Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, China—presents his latest work ‘Spatial Assembly of Grassland Communities and Interrelationships with Productivity’. Changjin discusses the critical role of spatial aggregation in predicting the effects of environmental change and their journey towards becoming an ecologist.
此博文的中文版本可在此处获得
About the paper
The assembly mechanism of plant diversity and its effect on ecosystem function have long challenged field and theoretical ecologists. Although numerous studies on the maintenance mechanisms of plant diversity and its relationship with productivity have provided important insights, there are also many uncertainties. For example, in studies of species biodiversity–productivity relationships, the results of controlled experiments and field experiments have been inconsistent. While some studies attribute this inconsistency to weak links between species diversity parameters and community assembly processes (e.g. species interactions), no suitable solution has been found so far.
Faced with this scientific dilemma, we theorised that spatial aggregation of the neighborhood, such as interspecific segregation and intraspecific aggregation, allows us to better understand community dynamics and better explain productivity than diversity (species and phylogenetic diversity) due to the sessile lifestyle of most plants, in which individuals mainly interfere with their neighbors.
About the research
The study is the first to apply per-plant localization to a large-scale field survey of grassland ecosystems. We employed the coordinates for 125,726 individual plants (within 1 m2 plots) sampled in natural grassland communities across two temperate grasslands (Loess Plateau and Mongolian Plateau) and one alpine grassland (Tibetan Plateau) to elucidate the assembly mechanisms of neighborhood spatial aggregation and interrelationships with above-ground net primary productivity (ANPP).
The findings of the study validated two scientific hypotheses as follows: (I) In temperate grasslands at relatively low altitudes (Loess Plateau and Mongolian Plateau), reproductive allocation will strongly constrain the spatial variation of spatial aggregation; however, spatial aggregation variation in Tibetan Plateau will be more affected by species richness. (II) ANPP will increase with the degree of interspecific segregation, and spatial aggregation better explains ANPP than species and phylogenetic diversity.
About the author
I am a Ph.D candidate at the School of Ecology and Nature Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, China. I have always been drawn to the natural world, which has been my greatest inspiration. I found myself asking questions regarding changes in ecosystems and why these changes were happening, and, subsequently, what these changes would mean for these ecosystems. I think one of the more intriguing ideas in ecology is that plant organisms may self-organize (despite adopting sessile lifestyles), creating spatial structures that influence species coexistence within communities, and therefore ecosystem functions. This perspective will be the focus of my future research.
The teams of Nianpeng He (from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) and Osbert Jianxin Sun (from the School of Ecology and Nature Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, China) jointly carried out this study. The research interests of Nianpeng He are focused on plant functional traits. They have developed innovative plant trait networks (PTNs), plant community traits (PCTs), ecosystem traits (ESTs) and a theoretical framework for predicting productivity based on plant community traits (Traits-based Productivity, TBP). If you are also interested in working in this area, please do contact them.
Enjoyed the blogpost? Read the research here!
