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-occur...