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Abstract Detail



Ecological Section

Mavrodiev, Evgeny V. [1], Gomez, Juan Pablo [2], Laktionov, Alexy P. [3], Robinson, Scott K. [1].

Invasive plant distributions recapitulate patterns found in native plant assemblages in a heterogeneous landscape.

Development of the neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography has provided a powerful tool to test for structure in plant assemblages. To perform this test, we investigated the southern part of the river Volga (SE Russia), which encompasses 11 distinct local floristic areas forming the strictly defined River Value. We used popular standard biogeographical tool, Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity (PAE) to estimate both non-random components and the level of structure of plant assemblages within these 11 areas, and also to compare patterns of relationships obtained between assemblages based on a) presumably native and b) presumably non-native species of the same assemblage. Alien and native plant species provide a good opportunity to test the influence of environmental variables in structuring biological assemblages because they can be considered as replicates of the assembly process under identical conditions but with very different dispersal capabilities. No other study, however, has previously treated native and non-native floras as independent replicates of the assembly process. The topological identity of PAE cladograms based on a) presumably native and b) presumably non-native species of the same assemblages argues that the assembly process of native and alien floras occurred in strikingly similar ways, and therefore is not random. We further test how abiotic variables can explain these identities and show that climate and soil, but not dispersal limitation explained better the relationships between floristic areas. Our results highlight how the assembly process is not always stochastic but instead determined by abiotic variables at least at the regional scale and that these variables might be different in organisms with different requirements and tolerances.


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1 - University of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History, PO Box 117800, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA
2 - University of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History and Department of Biology, PO. Box 117800, Gainesville, FL, 32611
3 - Astrakhan State University, Department of Biology, 20a Tatischev Street, Astrakhan, Russia, 414056

Keywords:
Neutral Theory
Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity
invasive plants
Native plants
Habitat Filtering
Lower Volga Valley.

Presentation Type: Poster:Posters for Sections
Session: P
Location: Eyrie/Boise Centre
Date: Monday, July 28th, 2014
Time: 5:30 PM
Number: PEC020
Abstract ID:434
Candidate for Awards:None


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