Data from: Experimental dominant plant removal results in contrasting assembly for dominant and non‐dominant plants

Understanding why communities appear deterministically dominated by
relatively few species is an age‐old debate in ecology. We hypothesised
that the dominant and non‐dominant species in a community are governed by
different assembly mechanisms where environmental conditions influence
dominant species more than non‐dominant species. Further, dominant plants
moderate the environment where non‐dominant species thrive, diminishing
the influence of environmental filtering and increasing the influence of
limiting similarity for non‐dominant species. We tested these hypotheses
by removing two dominant species in five temperate meadows. We found that
the composition of the non‐dominants diverged while the new dominants
converged over time. Phylogenetic analyses suggested that habitat
filtering and limiting similarity drove the new dominant species
simultaneously. Conversely, non‐dominant community assembly appeared more
unpredictable. These suggest that dominant species converged towards a
predictable environmentally driven optimum, while non‐dominant species
thrive in a moderated habitat, which probably reduced non‐dominant species
predictability.