Hotspots of Community Change: Temporal Dynamics Are Spatially Variable in Understory Plant Composition of a California Oak Woodland.

ABSTRACT: Community response to external drivers such climate and disturbance can lead to fluctuations in community composition, or to directional change. Temporal dynamics can be influenced by a combination of drivers operating at multiple spatial scales, including external landscape scale drivers, local abiotic conditions, and local species pools. We hypothesized that spatial variation in these factors can create heterogeneity in temporal dynamics within landscapes. We used understory plant species composition from an 11 year dataset from a California oak woodland to compare plots where disturbance was experimentally manipulated with the removal of livestock grazing and a prescribed burn. We quantified three properties of temporal variation: compositional change (reflecting the appearance and disa

SUBMITTER: Spotswood EN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4519272 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature