Using trait and phylogenetic diversity to evaluate the generality of the stress‐dominance hypothesis in eastern North American tree communities
By J. Coyle, F. Halliday, Bianca E. Lopez, K. Palmquist, P. Wilfahrt, Allen H. Hurlbert. 2014
143 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The stress-dominance hypothesis (SDH) is a model of community assembly predicting that the relative importance of environmental filtering increases and competition decreases along a gradient of increasing environmental stress. Tests of the SDH at limited spatial scales have thus far demonstrated equivocal support and no prior study has assessed the generality of the SDH at continental scales. We examined over 53 000 tree communities spanning the eastern United States to determine whether functional trait variation and phylogenetic diversity support the SDH for gradients of water and soil nutrient availability. This analysis incorporated two complementary datasets, those of the U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis National program and the Carolina Vegetation Survey, and was based on three ecologically important traits: leaf nitrogen, seed mass, and wood density. We found that mean trait values were weakly correlated with water and soil nutrient availability, but that trait diversity did not vary consistently along either gradient. This did not conform to trait variation expected under the SDH and instead suggested that environmental filters structure tree communities throughout both gradients, without evidence for an increased role of competition in less stressful environments. Phylogenetic diversity of communities was principally driven by the ratio of angiosperms to gymnosperms and therefore did not exhibit the pattern of variation along stress gradients expected under the SDH. We conclude that the SDH is not a general paradigm for all eastern North American tree communities, although it may operate in certain contexts.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e425331ba61ee3b8d233096f81bb7eacf04818ee
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Ecological Modeling
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Shedding light on shade: ecological perspectives of understorey plant life (2016, result): “This has also been shown to be the phylogenetic line of division in other stress tolerance studies (Stahl et al. 2013; Coyle et al. 2014; but see Hallik et al. 2009).”
- Changes in assembly rules along a stress gradient from open dry grasslands to wetlands (2016, background): “The strength of the assembly forming processes changed along the gradient: the filtering effect of the habitat was stronger under harsher environments, which supports the stressdominance hypothesis (Coyle et al. 2014).”
- A hyper‐arid environment shapes an inverse pattern of the fast–slow plant economics spectrum for above‐, but not below‐ground resource acquisition strategies (2018, background): “Our results differ from those of previous empirical studies in which trait variation decreased in poor-resource environments (Coyle et al., 2014; Grime et al., 1997; Swenson & Enquist, 2007) or alternatively, in which variability increased with aridity (e.g., Butterfield & Callaway, 2013;…”