Mycorrhiza-induced alterations in the spatial structure of stands in a subtropical forest

Abstract · Spatial aggregation patterns represent snapshots of ecological processes that occurred over an extensive period. Such processes can shape both the conspecific and the heterospecific spatial structure of plants across woody habitats. · We questioned here the degree to which conspecific and unspecific spatial aggregation varies with mycorrhizal type across 10 medium-sized forest plots at a nature reserve in a hotspot of plant diversity, subtropical China. · We observed weaker conspecific spatial aggregation of ectomycorrhiza-associating plant species, but also a higher unspecific spatial aggregation across stands dominated by ectomycorrhizal species. · Synthesis: We shed light on an underexplored structuring mechanism across woody stands. We link our results to ongoing debates on to how conspecific negative dependencies vary with mycorrhizal type across subtropical habitats. Description of the data and file structure Raw data from 10 x 10 m plots (Plot ID) in relation to the conspecific Clark and Evans statistics (Clark) of the species (Species) containing four or more observations (within the plot - Obs). The ECM column captures whether the species was identified upon microscopic observations in the lab to be ectomycorrhizal (TRUE) or not (FALSE). Raw data from 10 x 10 m plots (Plot ID) in relation to the heterospecific Clark and Evans statistics (Clark) of the species (Species) containing four or more observations (within the plot - Obs). The ECM column captures whether the species was identified upon microscopic observations in the lab to be ectomycorrhizal (TRUE) or not (FALSE). Code/software Analyses were carried out on R v 4.2.2 (R Core Team 2022) with the help of the library spatstat (Baddeley et al. 2015) to fit spatial statistics and the library vegan (Oksanen et al. 2022) to fit mixed effects linear models. For plotting our results, we used ggplot2 (Wickham 2016).