Abstract
The mechanisms underlying plant succession remain highly debated. Due to the local scope of most studies, we lack a global quantification of the relative importance of species addition ‘versus’ replacement. We assessed the role of these processes in the variation (β-diversity) of plant communities colonizing the forelands of 46 retreating glaciers worldwide, using both environmental DNA and traditional surveys. Our findings indicate that addition and replacement concur in determining community changes in deglaciated sites, but their relative importance varied over time. Taxa addition dominated immediately after glacier retreat, as expected in harsh environments, while replacement became more important for late-successional communities. These changes were aligned with total β-diversity changes, which were more pronounced between early-successional communities than between late-successional communities (>50 yr since glacier retreat). Despite the complexity of community assembly during plant succession, the observed global pattern suggests a generalized shift from the dominance of facilitation and/or stochastic processes in early-successional communities to a predominance of competition later on.
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Data availability
Raw sequence data (Sper01 marker) generated using the protocols described in the ‘Methods’ section are deposited in the ‘Sper01_raw_sequences.zip’ folder available in Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/6620359#.Y8E1OP6ZO5d)95. The data that support the findings of this study are provided as Supplementary Tables 1–3.
Code availability
Scripts for reproducing the results in this study are available as Supplementary codes.
Supplementary Code 1. Code reproducing bioinformatics steps.
Supplementary Code 2. Code reproducing taxonomic assignation.
Supplementary Code 3. R code for the MOTU filtering after bioinformatic analyses to remove sequences with best identity <90% and detected at a low frequency that can be artefacts produced by PCR, contaminants and sequencing errors.
Supplementary Code 4. R code to calculate beta-diversity and its components, run the main models and illustrate results.
Supplementary Code 5. R code to test the ability of our sampling design to detect breakpoints in segmented regressions.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Programme, Grant Agreement no. 772284 (IceCommunities) to I.C., A.C., A.G., S.M., A.B., R.A., R.S.A., F.G., L.G., N.K., G.A.D., J.P., W.T., M.C. and G.F.F. This research was also funded by Biodiversa+, the European Biodiversity Partnership under the 2021–2022 BiodivProtect joint call for research proposals, co-funded by the European Commission (grant agreement no. 101052342 ‘PrioritIce-Vanishing habitats: conservation priorities for glacier-related biodiversity threatened by climate change’) to I.C., R.A., W.T., M.C., M.G. and G.F.F. and with the funding organizations MUR and ANR. We thank R. Kaufmann, A. Guisan, K. Sieron and M. A. Morales-Martínez for help and discussions at various phases of this project.
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I.C., M.C. and G.F.F. conceived, developed and wrote the paper, with input from A.C., R. A., F.A., S.C.-F., M.G., A.R., A. Zerboni, P.T., J.P. and W.T.; I.C. performed the statistical analyses; A.G., S.M., A.B., F.G. and G.F.F. contributed to data preparation and curation; A.G., A.B. and L.G. performed laboratory analyses; A.G., S.M., A.B., R.A., F.A., R.S.A., P.A., P.A.G., S.C.-F., J.L.C.L, P.C., M.C.S., J.C., J.A.C.R., C.C., R.C.E., O.D., A.E., S.E., A.F., L.G., F.G., M.G, S.H., N.K., R.I.M., G.P., F.P., A.R., N.U., Y.Y., V.Z., A. Zerboni, A. Zimmer, G.A.D., J.P. M.C. and G.F.F. participated in sampling and the initial development of the study. All authors reviewed and/or provided input on the manuscript.
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Extended data
Extended Data Fig. 1 Patterns of β-diversity and its components over time measured with temporal data to support the conclusions based on the chronosequence approach.
Data was obtained from Fickert & Grüninger94, which sampled vascular plants with traditional methods in permanent plots during the first decade after the deglaciation of two glaciers in the Alps (N = 30 comparisons). a. β-diversity components. Boxplots indicate median (middle line), 25th, 75th percentiles (box), as well as 1.5 * interquartile range (whiskers) and outliers (dots). Diamonds indicate the mean values. b. Results of the Bayesian generalized mixed models assessing the effects of mean age and age differences between compared sites on the different β-diversity measures. Glacier identity and identity of sites involved in the comparisons were included as random factors. Parameters with 95% CI non-overlapping zero are highlighted in bold.
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Cantera, I., Carteron, A., Guerrieri, A. et al. The importance of species addition ‘versus’ replacement varies over succession in plant communities after glacier retreat. Nat. Plants 10, 256–267 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-023-01609-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-023-01609-4
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