Climate, topography and soil factors interact to drive community trait distributions in global drylands

  1. Yoann Le Bagousse-Pinguet 12
  2. Pierre Liancourt 10
  3. Nicolas Gross 245
  4. Francesco de Bello 110
  5. Carlos Roberto Fonseca 3
  6. Jens Kattge 67
  7. Enrique Valencia 2
  8. Jan Leps 19
  9. Fernando T. Maestre 8
  1. 1 Department of Botany, University of South Bohemia, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic
  2. 2 Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Mostoles, Spain
  3. 3 Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
  4. 4 INRA, Villiers en Bois, France
  5. 5 CNRS - Université La Rochelle, Villiers en Bois, France
  6. 6 Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany
  7. 7 German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany
  8. 8 Departamento de Biología y Geología, Física y Química Inorgánica, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Mostoles, Spain
  9. 9 Biology Centre CAS, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic
  10. 10 Czech Academy of Sciences, Trebon, Czech Republic
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Revista:
PeerJ Preprints

ISSN: 2167-9843

Año de publicación: 2016

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.7287/PEERJ.PREPRINTS.1913V1 GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: PeerJ Preprints

Resumen

The skewness and kurtosis of community trait distributions (CTDs) can provide important insights on the mechanisms driving community assembly and species coexistence. However, they have not been considered yet when describing global patterns in CTDs. We aimed to do so by evaluating how environmental variables (mean annual temperature [MAT] and precipitation [MAP], precipitation seasonality [PS], slope angle and sand content) and their interactions affected the mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis of the plant CTDs in global drylands. We gathered specific leaf area and maximum plant height data from 130 dryland communities from all continents except Antarctica. Over 90% of the studied communities had skewed CTDs for SLA and height or had kurtosis values differing from those of normal distributions. Higher MAT and/or lower MAP led to a shift toward plant communities over-represented by “conservative” strategies, and a decrease in functional diversity. However, considering interactions among environmental drivers increased the explanatory power of our models by 20%. Sand content strongly altered the responses of height to changes in MAT and MAP (climate × topo-edaphic interactions). Increasing PS reversed the effects of MAT and MAP (climate × climate interactions) on the four moments of CTDs for SLA, particularly in dry-subhumid regions. Our results indicate that the increase in PS forecasted by climate change models will reduce the functional diversity of dry-subhumid communities. They also indicate that ignoring interactions among environmental drivers can lead to misleading conclusions when evaluating global patterns in CTDs, and thus may dramatically undermine our ability to predict the impact of global environmental change on plant communities and associated ecosystem functioning.