Plant Functional Biodiversity is Influenced by Soil Moisture and Spatial Scaling

Color poster with text and graphs.Community assembly is the result of ecological selection processes, dispersal processes, and random drift processes. Selection processes can cause coexisting species to be more similar or more different in traits, depending on the strength of environmental filtering or resource partitioning. Differences in functional traits is also known as functional diversity. The “stress-dominance hypothesis” suggests that environmental stress causes environmental filtering and trait similarity, and a lack of stress causes greater resource partitioning and trait dissimilarity. While there have been some investigations of this in plants, there are very few if any studies of this in invertebrates. We sampled vegetation at three spatial grain sizes (0.1 m2, 1 m2, and 10 m2) to investigate how grain size may influence our conclusions about community assembly.University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire Office of Research and Sponsored Program