Species abundance-distribution relationship is currently a hot topic in community ecology. Previous studies have suggested that a positive abundance-distribution relationship is a widespread feature of ecological assemblage across a wide variety of organisms, but how this relationship varies among different functional groups remains unclear. In this study, the species abundance-distribution relationship in the tree layer, shrub layer, and herb layer were analyzed respectively in an oak forest (Quercus liaotungensis Koidz.), Beijing region, China. Ten transects were set up from the foot to the top of every west slope to create a continuous altitude gradient (1020-1770 m). The width of each transect was 10 m and the length of each transect ranged from 80.200 m, depending on the altitude range and slope degree. This study area consisted of 119 quadrats, each 10 x 10 m2. Within each quadrat, three sub-quadrats (1m x 1m) were randomly selected for the inventory of herb layer. Our results showed that the relationship between local species abundance and the regional distribution was significantly positive while the frequency distribution was unimodal in the three layers, indicating that locally abundant species were widely spread whereas locally rare species had restricted regional distributions. Variance partitioning of species abundance showed that the contribution of environmental variation and spatial variation to regulating the species abundance-distribution relationship of different layers are different: the pure geographical variation decreased and the pure soil variation increased in the order of tree layer, shrub layer, to herb layer, while the response due to total soil variation was similar in all three layer communities. The distribution of tree layer and shrub layer are mainly influenced by large-scale factors while herb layer distribution is more likely determined by local-scale factors.
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Disturbance is considered to be one of the main factors influencing variations in species diversity. While many experimental and observational studies provide a good understanding of how disturbance maintains the [alfa]-diversity, we know little about how disturbance influences [beta]-diversity, and the effects of disturbance intensity on spatial species turnover are lacking. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effects of disturbance on patterns of species similarity in wetland communities, and to identify how disturbance intensity affects the species similarity - distance relationship. In our study, four isolated wetland remnants under different agricultural drainage ditch densities were surveyed in Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China. Wetland disturbance was assessed by agricultural ditch densities, and species similarity was quantified by the Jaccard index. A simple measure of environmental distance was obtained by using water level and five soil variables, and a corresponding measure of geographical distance was made between pairs of plots from each site. Based on these data, we estimated rates of distance decay through regression of log-transformed compositional similarity against both environmental and geographical distance for pair-wise comparisons of wetland plots from each site. One key finding of our research is that disturbance intensity does influence the species similarity - distance relationship. At each site, species similarity decreased significantly with distance, and both effects of geographical and environmental distance were statistically significant. The results indicate that with disturbance intensity increasing, the distance decay rate decreases.
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