ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Functional Plant Ecology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1676356
This article is part of the Research TopicPlants in Karst Degraded Habitats: Diversity, Evolution, and Ecological FunctionsView all 3 articles
Assembly mechanism of primary forest dominated by habitat filtering in karst degradation region
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institute of Subtropical Agriculture Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changsha, China
- 2Central South University of Forestry and Technology School of Forestry, Changsha, China
- 3Huanjiang Observation and Research Station for Karst Ecosystem, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huanjiang, China
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The revelation of the assembly mechanism of plant communities in karst region has crucial implications for the restoration of degraded vegetation. Niche theory and neutral theory are the two main theories to elucidate community assembly of karst plant community. However, the relative significance of habitat filtration and biological action in community assembly remains a topic of debate. By using measurement of plant functional traits, detection of phylogenetic signal (K value), and average shared variance, our investigation aimed to ascertain whether species coexistence in community assembly of primary forest is driven by habitat filtering or biotic constraints. In all 10 plant functional traits, leaf carbon (LC) had the lowest variation coefficient, whereas leaf area (LA) exhibited the highest. Significant phylogenetic signals (P < 0.05) were identified for plant LC, LA, wood density (WD), leaf nitrogen (LN) and leaf phosphorus (LP). Phylogenetic signal strength (K < 1) of all traits indicated that the phylogenetic conservation of functional traits is relatively weak and may be influenced by environmental screening or convergent evolution. Both the phylogenetic net relatedness index (NRI) and nearest taxon index (NTI) were negative, indicating a divergent phylogenetic structure. Additionally, with the exception of LA and leaf length-width ratio (L/D), the mean pairwise trait distance indices (SES.PW) were greater than 0, suggesting a tendency towards aggregation in the functional trait structure. Furthermore, average shared variance demonstrated that variation in plant functional trait was predominantly influenced by soil fertility and topography of the sample plots. Our finding indicated that the community assembly of primary forest plant was dominated by habitat filtering, which could significantly promote a more profound comprehension of natural restoration in karst degradation region.
Keywords: Assembly mechanism, Average shared variance, plant traits, Phylogenetic signal, Karst region
Received: 30 Jul 2025; Accepted: 13 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sun, Yang, Zhang, He, Du, Zeng and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Lili Yang, t20081119@csuft.edu.cn
Hao Zhang, zhanghao@isa.ac.cn
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