Community composition and species traits and plot positions

Biodiversity decline and its cascading effects through trophic interactions pose a severe threat to ecosystem service worldwide. Within a synthetic conceptual framework for beta-diversity, we proposed a series of hypotheses related to multi-trophic community assembly in subtropical forests. Our results suggested that, resulting from niche-based bottom-up dynamics, producer dissimilarities are predominant in structuring consumer dissimilarity, the degree of which highly depends on the trophic dependency, the diversity facet and the data quality. More importantly, we detected a significant dynamic between niche-based processes (e.g. environmental filtering and competitive exclusion) with the increasing producer dissimilarity. These findings enrich our mechanistic understanding of the ‘Diversity Begets Diversity’ rule and the complexity of multi-trophic community assembly, which is fundamental and critical for sustainable biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management.