Du Yanjun, Zhang Rongchen, Tang Xinran, Wang Xinyang, Mao Lingfeng, Chen Guoke, Lai Jiangshan, Ma Keping
School of Tropical Agriculture and Forestry (School of Agricultural and Rural Affairs, School of Rural Revitalization), Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China.
HNU-ASU Joint International Tourism College, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China.
Plant Divers. 2024 May 25;46(4):502-509. doi: 10.1016/j.pld.2024.05.005. eCollection 2024 Jul.
The timing of flowering is an important driver of species distribution and community assembly patterns. However, we still have much to learn about the factors that shape flowering diversity (i.e., number of species flowering per period) in plant communities. One potential explanation of flowering diversity is the mid-domain effect, which states that geometric constraints on species ranges within a bounded domain (space or time) will yield a mid-domain peak in diversity regardless of ecological factors. Here, we determine whether the mid-domain effect explains peak flowering time (i.e., when most species of communities are flowering) across China. We used phenological data of 16,267 herbaceous and woody species from the provincial in China and species distribution data from the Chinese Vascular Plant Distribution Database to determine relationships between the observed number of species flowering and the number of species flowering as predicted by the mid-domain effect model, as well as between three climatic variables (mean minimum monthly temperature, mean monthly precipitation, and mean monthly sunshine duration). We found that the mid-domain effect explained a significant proportion of the temporal variation in flowering diversity across all species in China. Further, the mid-domain effect explained a greater proportion of variance in flowering diversity at higher latitudes than at lower latitudes. The patterns of flowering diversity for both herbaceous and woody species were related to both the mid-domain effect and environmental variables. Our findings indicate that including geometric constraints in conjunction with abiotic and biotic predictors will improve predictions of flowering diversity patterns.
开花时间是物种分布和群落组装模式的重要驱动因素。然而，对于塑造植物群落开花多样性（即每个时期开花的物种数量）的因素，我们仍有很多需要了解的地方。开花多样性的一种潜在解释是中间区域效应，该效应指出，在有界区域（空间或时间）内，物种范围的几何约束将产生多样性的中间区域峰值，而与生态因素无关。在这里，我们确定中间区域效应是否能解释中国各地的开花高峰时间（即群落中大多数物种开花的时间）。我们使用了来自中国各省的16267种草本和木本植物的物候数据以及中国维管植物分布数据库的物种分布数据，来确定观察到的开花物种数量与中间区域效应模型预测的开花物种数量之间的关系，以及与三个气候变量（月平均最低温度、月平均降水量和月平均日照时长）之间的关系。我们发现，中间区域效应解释了中国所有物种开花多样性时间变化的很大一部分。此外，中间区域效应在较高纬度地区比在较低纬度地区解释了更大比例的开花多样性方差。草本和木本物种的开花多样性模式都与中间区域效应和环境变量有关。我们的研究结果表明，将几何约束与非生物和生物预测因子结合起来将改善对开花多样性模式的预测。
