Affiliation:
1. Department of Biology, College of Natural and Computational Sciences University of Gondar Gondar Ethiopia
2. CAS Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden Chinese Academy of Sciences Mengla China
Abstract
AbstractTesting how local environmental conditions influence plant community assembly is important to understand the underlying mechanisms that promote and/or maintain biodiversity. Functional traits are used to find the broad spectrum of resource use strategies that plants use to respond to environmental variation. The patterns and drivers of plant community assembly through the lens of traits and phylogeny; however, remain to be studied in a uniquely biodiversity rich but poorly known fragmented dry Afromontane forest of Ethiopia. Here, we combined trait and community phylogenetic data from thirty sampling plots of 20 × 20 m size to determine the functional and phylogenetic structures and their drivers in a fragmented, human‐dominated dry evergreen Afromontane forest. We found phylogenetic and functional clustering of plants in which the effect of environment was found to be trait specific. A weak phylogenetic signal for traits was detected suggesting that species resource use strategies may not be inferred using species phylogenetic distance. Additionally, we found functional traits to be weak in predicting species abundance distribution. Overall, while this study shows a non‐random community assembly pattern, it also highlights the importance of deterministic processes being trait specific.Abstract in Amharic is available with online material.
Subject
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics