Light availability may have a strong effect shaping species composition below the forest canopies. However, the relative importance of environmental filtering is significantly enhanced from the local to the regional scale. From local to regional scales, the role of purely spatial structure declines sharply to negligible levels. At the regional scale, forest stand structure and environment contributed a cumulative explanatory rate in species composition was 23.0%.Ĭonclusions: This study confirms that, for subtropical broad-leaved evergreen forests, forest stand structure characterizing the light environment is an important driver of the variation in species composition, which deepens our understanding of the role of environmental filtering in driving the variation in species composition and remedies the traditional under-consideration of environmental factors. The cumulative contribution of forest stand structure and environment to the variation in species composition was 41.0% at the local level. However, inclusion of forest stand structure as an explanatory variable resulted in a significant decrease in the rate of spatial structure at the local level. Results: Inclusion of forest stand structure as an explanatory variable increased the response rate of the variation of species composition at both local and regional scales. To explore the main factors driving the variation of species composition, we analyzed the relative importance of individual explanatory variables using commonality analysis and hierarchical partitioning method. Methods: Based on a long-term community survey and airborne LiDAR data, we used redundancy analysis (RDA) and variance partitioning to analyze how environment, spatial structure, and forest stand structure were related to species composition variation in a subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest at both local and regional scales. We resolved the driving forces of species composition variation at local and regional scales, with an emphasis on the role of forest stand structure in driving the variation of species composition. Using forest stand structure, environmental factors, and spatial structure variables as the explanatory variables for the species composition variation. In this study, we sampled 19 separate 1-ha forest dynamics plots established among grids of 1 km 2 (regional scale) near the 20 ha subtropical mid-mountain moist evergreen broad-leaved forest dynamics plot (local scale, less than 1 km 2) in Ailao Mountains as a research platform. However, few studies have applied forest stand structure to explain the variation of species composition within forest communities. Forest stand structure characterizes the light availability and heterogeneity under forest canopies, and it is a major driving factor in the variation of species composition for forest communities. Aim: The variation of species composition can be partitioned into two components which are explained by environment and space, and can be used to further explore the niche process and neutral process of community assembly.
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