Mechanisms of coexistence: Exploring species sorting and character displacement in woody plants to alleviate belowground competition

Rarely do we observe competitive exclusion within plant communities, even though plants compete for a limited pool of resources. Thus, our understanding of the mechanisms sustaining plant biodiversity might be limited. In this study, we explore two common ecological strategies, species sorting and character displacement, that promote coexistence by reducing competition. We assess the degree to which woody plants may implement these two strategies to lower belowground competition for nutrients which occurs via nutritional (mostly mycorrhizal) mutualisms. First, we compile data on plant traits and the mycorrhizal association state of woody angiosperms using a global inventory of indigenous flora. Our analysis reveals that species in locations with high mycorrhizal diversity exhibit distinct mean values in leaf area and wood density based on their mycorrhizal type, indicating species sorting. Second, we reanalyze a large dataset on leaf area to demonstrate that in areas with high mycorrhiz..., All analyses were carried out to the subset of Angiosperms that were classified as woody species. We obtained data on leaf Area, tree height, leaf mass per area (LMA), and seed mass trait values from the Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset (Díaz et al., 2022), and wood density information from the International Centre for Research on Agroforestry (World Agroforestry 2023). The selection of plant traits for our analysis was a compromise between feasibility, yielding information for divergent sets of plant species, and covering the three documented sets of autocorrelated traits: the leaf economics spectrum, the wood economics spectrum, and the root economics spectrum. Lists of indigenous species per location were extracted from The Global Naturalized Alien Flora database, a global inventory (van Kleunen et al., 2019). To assess leaf area variability across plant species' distribution ranges, we utilized the SLA dataset from Wright et al. (2017). Mycorrhizal association type..., , # Mechanisms of coexistence: exploring species sorting and character displacement in woody plants to alleviate belowground competition.

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n2z34tn54](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n2z34tn54)

Most of the guidelines are available on the attached R script. All data are actually publically available and we derive information, whenever possible, from the original datasets. We included here only two files that required extensive processing which we could not integrate to the code. The two files contain multiple \"null\" values, which should be replaced by empty cells before running the code.

**coords.submit.csv** contains coordinates at a crude resolution for all the sites in the Naturalized Alien Flora database for whch we could do the matching. 

**mycorrhizaandwd.csv** contains wood density and mycorrhizal type information that we extracted from the following two sources: World Agroforestry and Delavaux et al., 2019.

## Description of the data and file structu...