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Full-Text Articles in Natural Resources Management and Policy

Understory Community Assembly Following Wildfire In Boreal Forests: Shift From Stochasticity To Competitive Exclusion And Environmental Filtering, Bo Liu, Han Y. H. Chen, Jian Yang Dec 2018

Understory Community Assembly Following Wildfire In Boreal Forests: Shift From Stochasticity To Competitive Exclusion And Environmental Filtering, Bo Liu, Han Y. H. Chen, Jian Yang

Forestry and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Understory vegetation accounts for the majority of plant species diversity and serves as a driver of overstory succession and nutrient cycling in boreal forest ecosystems. However, investigations of the underlying assembly processes of understory vegetation associated with stand development following a wildfire disturbance are rare, particularly in Eurasian boreal forests. In this study, we measured the phylogenetic and functional diversity and trait dispersions of understory communities and tested how these patterns changed with stand age in the Great Xing'an Mountains of Northeastern China. Contrary to our expectation, we found that understory functional traits were phylogenetically convergent. We found that random …


Relationships Among Biodiversity Dimensions Of Birds In Nebraska, Nadejda Mirochnitchenko Dec 2018

Relationships Among Biodiversity Dimensions Of Birds In Nebraska, Nadejda Mirochnitchenko

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Biological diversity, or biodiversity, is a multi-dimensional concept that can be decomposed to measure information about taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional variation within communities. Although the dimensions of biodiversity are interrelated, the assumption that measuring one dimension of diversity can inform about patterns in another dimension does not necessarily follow from theory or empirical study. The relationships among biodiversity dimensions is not well understood, nor how differences among dimensions could influence conservation decision making. Using the avian community as a study system, we explored the relationships of breadth metrics from the taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional dimensions among each other and across …