Author's School

Arts & Sciences

Author's Department

Biology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-16-2018

Originally Published In

Am Nat. 2018 May;191(5):658-667. doi: 10.1086/696834

Abstract

Spatial patterning is a key natural history attribute of sessile organisms that frequently emerges from and dictates potential for interactions among organisms. We tested whether bunchgrasses, the dominant plant functional group in longleaf pine savanna groundcover communities, are nonrandomly patterned by characterizing the spatial dispersion of three bunchgrass species across six sites in Louisiana and Florida. We mapped bunchgrass tussocks of >5.0 cm basal diameter in three [Formula: see text] plots at each site. We modeled tussocks as two-dimensional objects to analyze their spatial relationships while preserving sizes and shapes of individual tussocks. Tussocks were overdispersed (more regularly spaced than random) for all species and sites at the local interaction scale (<0.3 m). This general pattern likely arises from a tussock-centered, distance-dependent mechanism, for example, intertussock competition. Nonrandom spatial patterns of dominant species have implications for community assembly and ecosystem function in tussock-dominated grasslands and savannas, including those characterized by extreme biodiversity.

Comments

Article published in American Naturalist 2018 May;191(5):658-667. doi: 10.1086/696834

Dryad data: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.20536.

© 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial reuse of the work with attribution.

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2058-8468 [Jonathan A Myers]

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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