Deer herbivory as an important driver of divergence of ground vegetation communities in temperate forests

2063 5 9266 2 24849 document 9266 Suzuki et al 2012 Oikos.pdf application/pdf c42eb96fb4df2d14e107945881484eaa MD5 233716 2014-01-23 09:12:06 http://eprints.iliauni.edu.ge/2063/1/Suzuki%20et%20al%202012%20Oikos.pdf 2063 1 1 application/pdf text en public

Suzuki et al 2012 Oikos.pdf

9268 3 24851 document 9268 lightbox.jpg image/png c98e0a05ac3e2633096df96140a97c48 MD5 49695 2014-01-23 09:22:17 http://eprints.iliauni.edu.ge/2063/3/lightbox.jpg 2063 3 3 image/png other Thumbnails conversion from text to thumbnail_lightbox ge public

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http://eprints.org/relation/isVersionOf http://eprints.iliauni.edu.ge/id/document/9266 http://eprints.org/relation/isVolatileVersionOf http://eprints.iliauni.edu.ge/id/document/9266 http://eprints.org/relation/issmallThumbnailVersionOf http://eprints.iliauni.edu.ge/id/document/9266 archive 137 disk0/00/00/20/63 2015-04-16 06:03:40 2015-04-16 06:03:40 2015-04-16 06:03:40 article 471 show Suzuki Maki suzukima@k.u-tokyo.ac.jp Miyashita Tadashi Kabaya Hajime Ochiai Keiji Asada Masahiko Kikvidze Zaal zaal.kikvidze@iliauni.edu.ge Deer herbivory as an important driver of divergence of ground vegetation communities in temperate forests pub QEC ins18 public Ungulate herbivory can fundamentally affect terrestrial vegetation at the landscape and regional levels, but its impact has never been analyzed from meta-community perspectives. Here, we study a meta-community of forest ground-layer plants in a warm-temperate region along a clear gradient of deer density interplaying with gradients of other environmental factors (forest type, sky openness and topographic wetness). Canonical corresponding analysis showed that deer density was the most important determinant of species distributions. These distributions conformed to a two-directional filtering model, which selects for competitive species at low deer density but favours herbivory-tolerant plants at high deer density, with these two directions counterbalancing each other when herbivory is intermediary. This resulted in a bi-directionally nested meta-community, in which local species richness was highest at intermediate levels of deer density, conforming also to the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. Our results suggest that herbivory can be the most important driver of meta-community structure in mesic systems; this contrasts with the results of earlier studies conducted in harsh environments, where species sorting by abiotic factors at early life stages reduced the role of biotic interactions, including herbivory. 2012 Oikos 122 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 104-110 TRUE 1600-0706