Fire reduces morphospace occupation in plant communities

Ecology
Juli G Pausas, Miguel Verdú

Abstract

The two main assembly processes claimed to structure plant communities are habitat filtering and competitive interactions. The set of species growing in fire-prone communities has been filtered in such a way that species without fire-persistence traits have not successfully entered the community. Because plant traits are evolutionarily conserved and fire traits are correlated with other plant traits, communities under high fire frequency should not include all possible trait combinations, and thus the morphospace occupation by species in these communities should be lower than expected by chance (underoccupied). In contrast, communities under low fire frequency would lack the filtering factor, and thus their underoccupation of the morphospace is not expected. We test this prediction by comparing the morphospace occupation by species in communities located in the western Mediterranean Basin, five of them subject to high fire frequency (HiFi) and four to low fire frequency (LowFi). We first compile a set of morphological and functional traits for the species growing on the nine sites, then we compute the morphospace occupation of each site as a convex hull volume, and finally, to assert that our results are not a product of a rand...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jan 9, 2010·Oecologia·Fernando OjedaMiguel Verdú
Aug 29, 2012·Oecologia·Vinícius de L DantasMarcus Vinicius Cianciaruso
Jul 20, 2011·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Evan WeiherStephen Bentivenga
Jun 5, 2013·Evolution; International Journal of Organic Evolution·Miguel Verdú, Juli G Pausas
Nov 17, 2009·Journal of Theoretical Biology·Franck Jabot
Nov 2, 2011·The New Phytologist·Juli G PausasGuadalupe Corcobado
Mar 19, 2013·The New Phytologist·Simon ScheiterSteven I Higgins
Sep 24, 2014·Ecology and Evolution·Daniel F ShryockTodd C Esque
May 8, 2015·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Hugo Fort, Muhittin Mungan
Oct 2, 2019·Frontiers in Plant Science·E Louise LoudermilkJoseph J O'Brien
Sep 12, 2017·The New Phytologist·Johannes H C CornelissenRien Aerts
Nov 16, 2018·The Science of the Total Environment·Carlotta FerraraMaurizio Marchi

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