Spatial associations between plants and vegetation community characteristics provide insights into the processes influencing plant rarity.

ABSTRACT: Determining the drivers of plant rarity is a major challenge in ecology. Analysing spatial associations between different plant species can provide an exploratory avenue for understanding the ecological drivers of plant rarity. Here, we examined the different types of spatial associations between rare and common plants to determine if they influence the occurrence patterns of rare species. We completed vegetation surveys at 86 sites in woodland, forest, and heath communities in south-east Australia. We also examined two different rarity measures to quantify how categorisation criteria affected our results. Rare species were more likely to have positive associations with both rare and common species across all three vegetation communities. However, common species had positive or negative as

SUBMITTER: Sritharan MS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8687526 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature