Topographically controlled soil moisture is the primary driver of local vegetation patterns across a lowland region

Topography is recognized as an important factor in controlling plant distribution and diversity patterns, but its scale dependence and the underlying mechanisms by which it operates are not well understood. Here, we used novel high-resolution (2-m scale) topographic data from more than 30500 vegetation plots to assess the importance of topography for local plant diversity and distribution patterns across Denmark, a 43000 km2 lowland region. The vegetation data came from 901 nature conservation sites (mean size = 0.16 km2) distributed throughout Denmark, each having an average of 34 plots (five-meter radius) per site. We employed a variety of statistical measures and techniques to investigate scale dependence and mechanistic drivers operating within the study region. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) multiple regression modeling scaled at different spatial resolutions (2 × 2, 10 × 10, 50 × 50, 100 × 100 and 250 × 250 m) was used to identify the horizontal resolution yielding the strongest vegetation–topography ...

[1]  Emery R. Boose,et al.  Hurricane impacts to tropical and temperate forest landscapes , 1994 .

[2]  Jiliang Liu,et al.  Habitat degradation, topography and rainfall variability interact to determine seed distribution and recruitment in a sand dune grassland , 2009 .

[3]  C. Ahn,et al.  Characterization of microtopography and its influence on vegetation patterns in created wetlands , 2007, Wetlands.

[4]  James B. Grace,et al.  The factors controlling species density in herbaceous plant communities: an assessment , 1999 .

[5]  Katherine L. Gross,et al.  WHAT IS THE OBSERVED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPECIES RICHNESS AND PRODUCTIVITY , 2001 .

[6]  Antoine Guisan,et al.  Predictive habitat distribution models in ecology , 2000 .

[7]  I. Sun,et al.  Relations of soil properties to topography and vegetation in a subtropical rain forest in southern Taiwan , 1997, Plant Ecology.

[8]  T. Økland,et al.  Species richness in boreal swamp forests of SE Norway: The role of surface microtopography , 2008 .

[9]  L. Vierling,et al.  Lidar: shedding new light on habitat characterization and modeling , 2008 .

[10]  Mike P. Austin,et al.  Continuum Concept, Ordination Methods, and Niche Theory , 1985 .

[11]  H. Balslev,et al.  Topographic and spatial controls of palm species distributions in a montane rain forest, southern Ecuador , 2008, Biodiversity and Conservation.

[12]  J. Calvert,et al.  Glossary of atmospheric chemistry terms (Recommendations 1990) , 1990 .

[13]  D. Augustine.  Spatial heterogeneity in the herbaceous layer of a semi-arid savanna ecosystem , 2003, Plant Ecology.

[14]  Martin Kopecký,et al.  Using topographic wetness index in vegetation ecology: does the algorithm matter? , 2010 .

[15]  J. Grytnes.  Species‐richness patterns of vascular plants along seven altitudinal transects in Norway , 2003 .

[16]  J. Silvertown,et al.  Hydrologically defined niches reveal a basis for species richness in plant communities , 1999, Nature.

[17]  W. Gould,et al.  Landscape-scale patterns in plant species richness along an arctic river , 1997 .

[18]  H. H. Bruun,et al.  Gradient analysis of dry grassland vegetation in Denmark. , 2000 .

[19]  M. Hill,et al.  Slope, aspect and climate: Spatially explicit and implicit models of topographic microclimate in chalk grassland , 2008 .

[20]  P. Boon,et al.  The importance of water regimes operating at small spatial scales for the diversity and structure of wetland vegetation , 2010 .

[21]  A. Shmida,et al.  Biological determinants of species diversity , 1985 .

[22]  John F. O'Callaghan,et al.  The extraction of drainage networks from digital elevation data , 1984, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[23]  Douglas W. Burbank,et al.  Characteristic size of relief , 1992, Nature.

[24]  G. Vivian‐Smith.  MICROTOPOGRAPHIC HETEROGENEITY AND FLORISTIC DIVERSITY IN EXPERIMENTAL WETLAND COMMUNITIES , 1997 .

[25]  H. Boyko.  On the Role of Plants as Quantitative Climate Indicators and the Geo-Ecological Law of Distribution , 1947 .

[26]  Birgit Reger,et al.  Modelling effective thermal climate for mountain forests in the Bavarian Alps: Which is the best model? , 2011 .

[27]  Michael Gottfried,et al.  Prediction of Vegetation Patterns at the Limits of Plant Life: A New View of the Alpine-Nival Ecotone , 1998 .

[28]  Carsten Rahbek,et al.  The patterns and causes of elevational diversity gradients , 2012 .

[29]  Dylan Keon,et al.  Equations for potential annual direct incident radiation and heat load , 2002 .

[30]  A. Knapp.  Early season production and microclimate associated with topography in a C4 dominated grassland , 1985 .

[31]  J. Pausas,et al.  The effect of bedrock type, temperature and moisture on species richness of Pyrenean Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) forests , 1995, Vegetatio.

[32]  D. Hix,et al.  Influence of aspect and stand age on ground flora of southeastern Ohio forest ecosystems , 1998, Plant Ecology.

[33]  Mirkka M. Jones,et al.  Microhabitat partitioning promotes plant diversity in a tropical montane forest , 2011 .

[34]  Jonathan M. Chase,et al.  The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi-scale community ecology , 2004 .

[35]  J. Wilson.  The twelve theories of co‐existence in plant communities: the doubtful, the important and the unexplored , 2011 .

[36]  J. Porter,et al.  Agroecology, scaling and interdisciplinarity , 2003 .

[37]  Brian Huntley,et al.  Influence of slope and aspect on long‐term vegetation change in British chalk grasslands , 2006 .

[38]  H. Balslev,et al.  Topographic separation of two sympatric palms in the central Amazon – does dispersal play a role? , 2012 .

[39]  Tuuli Toivonen,et al.  Prediction of total and rare plant species richness in agricultural landscapes from satellite images and topographic data , 2002, Landscape Ecology.

[40]  T. Mikita,et al.  Topographic Exposure and its Practical Applications , 2010 .

[41]  K. McConway,et al.  A fundamental, eco-hydrological basis for niche segregation in plant communities. , 2011, The New phytologist.

[42]  J. Seibert,et al.  On the calculation of the topographic wetness index: evaluation of different methods based on field observations , 2005 .

[43]  Lars Arge,et al.  Geographically Comprehensive Assessment of Salt-Meadow Vegetation-Elevation Relations Using LiDAR , 2011, Wetlands.

[44]  A. R. Ennos,et al.  Wind as an ecological factor. , 1997, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[45]  M. Zobel,et al.  The relative of species pools in determining plant species richness: an alternative explanation of species coexistence? , 1997, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[46]  John-Arvid Grytnes,et al.  Local temperatures inferred from plant communities suggest strong spatial buffering of climate warming across Northern Europe , 2013, Global change biology.

[47]  Christopher J. Lortie,et al.  Effects of a directional abiotic gradient on plant community dynamics and invasion in a coastal dune system , 2007 .

[48]  D. Crawford.  Systematic relationships in the narrow-leaved species of chenopodium of the Western United States , 1975, Brittonia.

[49]  B. Fu,et al.  Relationships between soil characteristics, topography and plant diversity in a heterogeneous deciduous broad-leaved forest near Beijing, China , 2004, Plant and Soil.

[50]  M. Diekmann.  Species indicator values as an important tool in applied plant ecology – a review , 2003 .

[51]  S. Levin.  The problem of pattern and scale in ecology , 1992 .