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Relationships of community diversity with distributions of rare species, non-native plants, and compositional stability in a temperate forest–open habitat landscape

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Abstract

Three hypotheses regarding relationships between community diversity and occurrences of rare and non-native species and community stability include: (1) diverse communities contain the greatest numbers of rare species, (2) hotspots of native species richness and abundance also support many non-native species, and (3) community diversity promotes stability. We explored these hypotheses by sampling plant communities during two years (2018, 2021) in 151, 0.05-ha plots across a landscape of temperate forests and open habitats (e.g., prairies) in Ohio, USA. Occurrence of rare plant species corresponded with the most species-rich and diverse (Shannon diversity index) communities in one or both study years. Species richness of native and non-native plants was positively associated both years but cover was not. Stability of species composition between 2018 and 2021 was unrelated to 2018 species richness and was negatively related to community diversity and evenness. The most diverse sites were not the most compositionally stable. Although statistically significant relationships occurred between community diversity measures and rare and non-native species distributions and community compositional stability, the relationships were often weak or mainly only evident at the extremes. Moreover, variance partitioning indicated that occurrences of rare and non-native species and community compositional stability were more closely associated with location effects within the landscape and community type than they were to community diversity. Nevertheless, when especially high or low, community diversity measures may facilitate predicting levels of other community components of conservation priority, such as rare species occurrences.

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Data availability

The plant community dataset analyzed in the paper is available in Online Resource 1, which includes a listing of species recorded on plots during the study.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Jordan Penkava and Renee Dollard for help with fieldwork in 2018 and Ashley Fink and Liz Stahl in 2021; Josh Brenwell for GIS support and preparing Fig. 1; Lindsay Chiquoine for programming generalized linear mixed models; and the editor and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript.

Funding

Metroparks Toledo funded this study through a contract to Natural Resource Conservation LLC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, 89154-4004, USA

    Scott R. Abella

  2. Natural Resource Conservation LLC, 1400 Colorado Street, Boulder City, NV, 89005, USA

    Scott R. Abella

  3. Metroparks Toledo, 5100 Central Avenue, Toledo, OH, 43615, USA

    Karen S. Menard & Timothy A. Schetter

  4. Haley & Aldrich, Inc., 6420 South Macadam Avenue, Portland, OR, 97239, USA

    Timothy L. Walters

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  1. Scott R. Abella
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  2. Karen S. Menard
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design; KSM, TLW, and SRA collected the data; SRA analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript; all authors edited and approved the manuscript drafts.

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Correspondence to Scott R. Abella.

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Abella, S.R., Menard, K.S., Schetter, T.A. et al. Relationships of community diversity with distributions of rare species, non-native plants, and compositional stability in a temperate forest–open habitat landscape. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 24, 21–33 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42974-023-00138-6

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