Analysing species abundance distribution patterns across sampling scales in three natural forests in Northeastern China

doi:10.3832/ifor3211-013

Analysing species abundance distribution patterns across sampling scales in three natural forests in Northeastern China

Lingzhao Tan^(1-2), Peng Zhang⁽¹⁾, Xiuhai Zhao⁽¹⁾ , Chunyu Fan⁽¹⁾, Chunyu Zhang⁽¹⁾, Yan Yan⁽³⁾, Klaus Von Gadow^(4-5)

iForest - Biogeosciences and Forestry, Volume 13, Issue 6, Pages 482-489 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.3832/ifor3211-013
Published: Nov 01, 2020 - Copyright © 2020 SISEF

Research Articles

PDF Version

Full Text

Citation

Geo-mapping

Understanding how and why species abundance distributions (SADs) vary with sampling scale has been a long-standing issue in ecology. By fitting various SAD models with observations collected in three large forest field plots, the objective of this study is to explore how the shape of SADs and the predictive ability of SAD models vary with sampling scales. Based on a large dataset collected in the Changbaishan, Jiaohe and Liangshui forests in northeastern China, observed SADs were compared with SADs estimated using five different models (log-normal, broken stick, Zipf, niche preemption and neutral model) at four sampling scales (10 × 10 m, 30 × 30 m, 60 × 60 m and 90 × 90 m). The results show that the studied SADs are scale dependent. Niche-based models provided a better fit at small sample sizes, the predictive ability decreasing with increasing sampling scale. The neutral model performed better at large sample sizes, the predictive ability increasing with increasing sampling scale. We identify the models that provided the best fit to observed species abundance distributions across spatial scales, and conclude that there is not one best SAD model for all spatial scales. Future studies should consider the scale effects on the species abundance distribution.

Keywords

Community Ecology, Neutral Theory, Niche Theory, Scale Effects, Species Abundance Distribution, Temperate Forest, Woody Plants

Authors’ address

(1)

0000-0001-6401-5277
0000-0002-6769-3310
0000-0003-0879-4063
0000-0002-3360-2919
0000-0003-3091-5060
Research Center of Forest Management Engineering of State Forestry and Grassland Administration, Beijing Forestry University, 100083 Beijing (China)

(2)

0000-0001-6401-5277
Hunan Lishui Hydro & Power Company Limited, 410004 Changsha (China)

(3)

College of Forestry, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shanxi 712100 (China)

(4)

0000-0003-3641-0397
Faculty of Forestry and Forest Ecology, Georg-August-University GoÌˆttingen, Büsgenweg 5, D-37077 Göttingen (Germany)

(5)

0000-0003-3641-0397
Department of Forest and Wood Science, University of Stellenbosch (South Africa)

Corresponding author

Xiuhai Zhao
zhaoxh@bjfu.edu.cn

Citation

Tan L, Zhang P, Zhao X, Fan C, Zhang C, Yan Y, Von Gadow K (2020). Analysing species abundance distribution patterns across sampling scales in three natural forests in Northeastern China. iForest 13: 482-489. - doi: 10.3832/ifor3211-013

Academic Editor

Michele Carbognani

Paper history

Received: Aug 07, 2019
Accepted: Aug 15, 2020

First online: Nov 01, 2020
Publication Date: Dec 31, 2020
Publication Time: 2.60 months

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Breakdown by View Type

(Waiting for server response...)

Article Usage

Total Article Views: 6851
(from publication date up to now)

Breakdown by View Type
HTML Page Views: 4601
Abstract Page Views: 290
PDF Downloads: 1546
Citation/Reference Downloads: 6
XML Downloads: 408

Web Metrics
Days since publication: 1271
Overall contacts: 6851
Avg. contacts per week: 37.73

Article Citations

Article citations are based on data periodically collected from the Clarivate Web of Science web site
(last update: Nov 2020)

(No citations were found up to date. Please come back later)

(no Plumx Metrics available for this paper)

Publication Metrics

by Dimensions ^©

Articles citing this article

List of the papers citing this article based on CrossRef Cited-by.

(1)

Austin MP (2002)
Spatial prediction of species distribution: an interface between ecological theory and statistical modelling. Ecological Modelling 157 (2-3): 101-118.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(2)

Bazzaz FA (1975)
Plant species diversity in old-field successional ecosystems in southern Illinois. Ecology 56 (2): 485-488.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(3)

Borda-De-Agua L, Borges PAV, Hubbell SP, Pereira HM (2012)
Spatial scaling of species abundance distributions. Ecography 35: 549-556.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(4)

Chave J (2004)
Neutral theory and community ecology. Ecology Letters 7: 241-253.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(5)

Collins SL, Glenn SM (1997)
Effects of organismal and distance scaling on analysis of species distribution and abundance. Ecological applications 7: 543-551.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(6)

De Cáceres M, Legendre P, Valencia R, Cao M, Chang LW, Chuyong G, Condit R, Hao Z, Hsieh CF, Hubbell S, Kenfack D, Ma K, Mi X, Noor MNS, Kassim AR, Ren H, Su SH, Sun IF, Thomas D, Ye W, He F (2012)
The variation of tree beta diversity across a global network of forest plots. Global Ecology and Biogeography 21 (11): 1191-1202.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(7)

Dornelas M, Connolly SR (2008)
Multiple modes in a coral species abundance distribution. Ecology Letters 11 (10): 1008-1016.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(8)

Dunstan PK, Bax NJ, Foster SD, Williams A, Althaus F (2012)
Identifying hotspots for biodiversity management using rank-abundance distribution. Diversity and Distributions 18: 22-32.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(9)

Etienne RS, Olff H (2005)
Confronting different models of community structure to species-abundance data: a bayesian model comparison. Ecology Letters 8 (5): 493-504.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(10)

Engen S, Lande R (1996)
Population dynamic models generating species abundance distributions of the gamma type. Journal of Theoretical Biology 178 (3): 325-331.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(11)

Fan C, Tan L, Zhang C, Zhao X, Gadow KV (2017)
Analysing taxonomic structures and local ecological processes in temperate forests in north eastern china. BMC Ecology 17 (1): 10854.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(12)

Fisher RA, Cobert AS, Williams CB (1943)
The relation between the number of species and the number of individuals in a random sample of an animal population. Journal of Animal Ecology 12: 42-58.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(13)

Foster MA, Warton DI (2007)
A metacommunity-scale comparison of species-abundance distribution models for plant communities of Eastern Australia. Ecography 30 (4): 449-458.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(14)

Frontier S (1985)
Diversity and structure in aquatic ecosystems. Oceanography and Marine Biology 23: 253-312.
Gscholar

(15)

Gao J, Zhang P, Zhang X, Liu Y (2018)
Multi-scale analysis on species diversity within a 40-ha old-growth temperate forest. Plant Diversity 40 (2): 45-49.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(16)

Green JL, Plotkin JB (2007)
A statistical theory for sampling species abundances. Ecology Letters 10 (11): 1037-1045.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(17)

Hankin RKS (2007)
Introducing untb, an R package for simulating ecological drift under the unified neutral theory of biodiversity. Journal of Statistical Software 22 (12): 1-15.
Online | Gscholar

(18)

Hubbell SP (2001)
The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA, pp. 375.
Online | Gscholar

(19)

Hubbell SP (2006)
Neutral theory and the evolution of ecological equivalence. Ecology 87: 1387-1398.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(20)

Komonen A, Elo M (2017)
Ecological response hides behind the species abundance distribution: community response to low-intensity disturbance in managed grasslands. Ecology and Evolution 7 (20): 8558-8566.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(21)

MacArthur RH (1957)
On the relative abundance of bird species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 43: 293-295.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(22)

McGlinn DJ, Xiao X, May F, Daniel McGlinn J X, Xiao Felix May Gotelli NJ, Engel T, Blowes SA, Knight TM, Purschke O, Chase JM, McGill BJ (2019)
Measurement of Biodiversity (MoB): a method to separate the scale-dependent effects of species abundance distribution, density, and aggregation on diversity change. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 10: 258-269.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(23)

Magurran AE (2004)
Measuring biological diversity. Blackwell Science, Oxford, UK, pp. 264.
Online | Gscholar

(24)

Matthews TJ, Whittaker RJ (2014)
Fitting and comparing competing models of the species abundance distribution: assessment and prospect. Frontiers of Biogeography 6 (2): 67-82.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(25)

Matthews TJ, Borges PAV, Whittaker RJ (2014)
Multimodal species abundance distributions: a deconstruction approach reveals the processes behind the pattern. Oikos 123: 533-544.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(26)

May RM (1975)
Patterns of species abundance and diversity. Ecology and Evolution of Communities 1975: 81-120.
Gscholar

(27)

McGill BJ, Etienne RS, Gray JS, Alonso D, Anderson MJ, Benecha HK, Dornelas M, Enquist BJ, Green JL, He FL, Huilbert AH, Magurran AE, Marquet PA, Maurer BA, Ostling A, Soykan CU, Ugland KI, White EP (2007)
Species abundance distributions: moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework. Ecology Letters 10: 995-1015.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(28)

Motomura I (1932)
On the statistical treatment of communities. Zoology Management 44: 379-383.
Gscholar

(29)

Oksanen J, Blanchet FG, Friendly M, Kindt R, Legendre P, McGlinn D, Minchin PR, O’Hara RB, Simpson GL, Solymos P, Henry M, Stevens H, Szoecs E, Wagner H (2009)
vegan: community ecology package. Version 1.15. R Project for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
Online | Gscholar

(30)

Preston FW (1948)
The commonness, and rarity, of species. Ecology 29: 254-283.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(31)

R Development Core Team (2016)
R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
Online | Gscholar

(32)

Tan L, Fan C, Zhang C, Gadow KV, Fan X (2017)
How beta diversity and the underlying causes vary with sampling scales in the Changbai mountain forests. Ecology and Evolution 7 (23): 10116-10123.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(33)

Tokeshi M (1993)
Species abundance patterns and community structure. Advances in Ecological Research 24: 111-186.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(34)

Tokeshi M (1990)
Niche apportionment or random assortment: species abundance patterns revisited. Journal of Animal Ecology 59 (3): 1129-1146.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(35)

Walker SC, Cyr H (2007)
Testing the standard neutral model of biodiversity in lake communities. Oikos 116: 143-155.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(36)

Wang X, Hao Z, Ye J, Zhang J, Li B, Yao X (2008)
Spatial pattern of diversity in an old-growth temperate forest in northeastern china. Acta Oecologica 33 (3): 0-354.
CrossRef | Gscholar

(37)

Williams CB (1964)
Patterns in the balance of nature, and related problems in quantitative ecology. Academic Press, London, UK and New York, USA, pp. 324.
Online | Gscholar

(38)

Wisz MS, Hijmans RJ, Li J, Peterson AT, Graham CH, Guisan A, NCEAS Predicting Species Distributions Working Group (2008)
Effects of sample size on the performance of species distribution models. Diversity and Distributions 14 (5): 763-773.
CrossRef | Gscholar

iForest - Biogeosciences and Forestry

Contents

Search

Journal Info

Journal Subjects and Fields

For Authors

For Reviewers

For Readers

SISEF Publishing

Search iForest Contents