Data from: A phylogenetic- and trait-based analysis of community assembly in a subtropical forest in central China

Despite several decades of study in community ecology, the relative
importance of the ecological processes that determine species
co-occurrence across spatial scales remains uncertain. Some of this
uncertainty may be reduced by studying the scale dependency of community
assembly in the light of environmental variation. Phylogenetic and
functional trait information are often used to provide potentially
valuable insights into the drivers of community assembly. Here, we
combined phylogenetic- and trait-based tests to gain insights into
community processes at four spatial scales in a large stem-mapped
subtropical forest dynamics plot in central China. We found that all of
the six leaf economic traits measured in this study had weak, but
significant, phylogenetic signal. Non-random phylogenetic and trait-based
patterns associated with topographic variables indicate that deterministic
processes tend to dominate community assembly in this plot. Specifically,
we found that, on average, co-occurring species were more phylogenetically
and functionally similar than expected throughout the plot at most spatial
scales and assemblages of less similar than expected species could only be
found on finer spatial scales. In sum, our results suggest that the
trait-based effects on community assembly change with spatial scale in a
predictable manner and the association of these patterns with topographic
variables, indicates the importance of deterministic processes in
community assembly relatively to random processes.