Community composition and species traits and plot positions

Biodiversity decline and its cascading effects through trophic
interactions pose a severe threat to ecosystem service worldwide. Within a
synthetic conceptual framework for beta-diversity, we proposed a series of
hypotheses related to multi-trophic community assembly in subtropical
forests. Our results suggested that, resulting from niche-based bottom-up
dynamics, producer dissimilarities are predominant in structuring consumer
dissimilarity, the degree of which highly depends on the trophic
dependency, the diversity facet and the data quality. More importantly, we
detected a significant dynamic between niche-based processes (e.g.
environmental filtering and competitive exclusion) with the increasing
producer dissimilarity. These findings enrich our mechanistic
understanding of the ‘Diversity Begets Diversity’ rule and the complexity
of multi-trophic community assembly, which is fundamental and critical for
sustainable biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management.