Community phylogenetic structure of grasslands and its relationship with environmental factors on the Mongolian Plateau

作     者：DONG Lei LIANG Cunzhu LI Frank Yonghong ZHAO Liqing MA Wenhong WANG Lixin WEN Lu ZHENG Ying LI Zijing ZHAO Chenguang Indree TUVSHINTOGTOKH 

作者机构：Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Ecology and Resource Use of the Mongolian Plateau&Inner Mongolia KeyLaboratory of Grassland EcologySchool of Ecology and EnvironmentInner Mongolia UniversityHohhot010021China Forestry and Desert Control Research Institute of Alagxa LeagueBayanhot750306China Institute of General and Experimental BiologyMongolian Academy of SciencesUlaanbaatar-51Mongolia 

出 版 物：《Journal of Arid Land》 (干旱区科学（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2019年第11卷第4期

页      面：595-607页

核心收录：

学科分类：0710[理学-生物学] 0830[工学-环境科学与工程（可授工学、理学、农学学位）] 090503[农学-草业科学] 0909[农学-草学] 0709[理学-地质学] 0905[农学-畜牧学] 0708[理学-地球物理学] 09[农学] 0815[工学-水利工程] 0705[理学-地理学] 0903[农学-农业资源与环境] 

基　　金：supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0500503) the Science and Technology Program of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China (20140409, 201503001) 

主　　题：phylogenetic overdispersion environmental factors phylogenetic β diversity spatial scale environmental distance climate change Mongolian Plateau 

摘      要：The community assembly rules and species coexistence have always been interested by ecologists. The community phylogenetic structure is the consequence of the interaction process between the organisms and the abiotic environment and has been used to explain the relative impact of abiotic and biotic factors on species co-existence. In recent years, grassland degradation and biodiversity loss have become increasingly severe on the Mongolian Plateau, while the drivers for these changes are not clearly explored, especially whether climate change is a main factor is debated in academia. In this study, we examined the phylogenetic structure of grassland communities along five transects of climate aridity on the Mongolian Plateau, and analyzed their relations with environmental factors, with the aims to understand the formation mechanism of the grassland communities and the role of climatic factors. We surveyed grassland communities at 81 sites along the five transects, and calculated their net relatedness index(NRI) at two different quadrat scales(small scale of 1 m2 and large scale of 5 m2) to characterize the community phylogenetic structure and analyze its relationship with the key 11 environmental factors. We also calculated the generalized UniFrac distance(GUniFrac) among the grassland communities to quantify the influence of spatial distance and environmental distance on the phylogenetic β diversity. The results indicated that plant community survey using the large scale quadrat contained sufficient species to represent community compositions. The community phylogenetic structure of grasslands was significantly overdispersed at both the small and large scales, and the degree of overdispersion was greater at the large scale than at the small scale, suggesting that competitive exclusion instead of habitat filtering played a major role in determination of community composition. Altitude was the main factor affecting the community phylogenetic structure, whereas climati