Forest community assembly is driven by different strata‐dependent mechanisms along an elevational gradient
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim The mechanisms driving forest community assembly along elevational gradients remain elusive. The distinct strata in heterogeneous forest are subject to differing assembly mechanisms. This study aims to evaluate how different ecological mechanisms driving forest community assembly across strata and spatial scales, and to identify how these assemblages respond to different abiotic or biotic variables along an elevational gradient. Location Yulong Mountain within Hengduan Mountains, Southwest China. Taxon Seed plants. Methods We sampled plant species along a 1,200 m elevational gradient across forest strata (trees, shrubs and herbs) at different spatial scales (neighbourhood and community). We integrated phylogenetic and functional diversity to disentangle the roles of ecological mechanisms in structuring community assembly. We also determined the relative effects of climatic, soil and biotic variables and their interactions on these community assemblages. Results The phylogenetic and functional diversity of trees were lower at the extremes of the elevational gradient, where they were constrained by water availability or temperature. While communities with higher species diversity exhibited an overdispersed structure at mid‐elevations. For shrubs, overdispersion was exhibited at high elevations despite low species richness, which could be consistent with facilitative interactions or competition exclusion. However, most communities of herbs appear to have a markedly random structure, despite some incongruence between phylogenetic divergence and functional convergence, as well as influences from overstorey trees and local light conditions. The relative effects of abiotic variables on community structure were larger at the community scale than at the neighbourhood scale. Main conclusions Our study emphasises the importance of considering phylogenies and traits in understanding the strata‐ and scale‐dependent mechanisms of forest community assembly. Collectively, results indicate that contrasting assembly mechanisms interact across different strata along elevational gradients to shape diverse forest communities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".