Trait means or variance-What determines plant species' local and regional occurrence in fragmented dry grasslands?

ABSTRACT: One of the few laws in ecology is that communities consist of few common and many rare taxa. Functional traits may help to identify the underlying mechanisms of this community pattern, since they correlate with different niche dimensions. However, comprehensive studies are missing that investigate the effects of species mean traits (niche position) and intraspecific trait variability (ITV, niche width) on species abundance. In this study, we investigated fragmented dry grasslands to reveal trait-occurrence relationships in plants at local and regional scales. We predicted that (a) at the local scale, species occurrence is highest for species with intermediate traits, (b) at the regional scale, habitat specialists have a lower species occurrence than generalists, and thus, traits associated

SUBMITTER: Bergholz K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8019038 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature