Plant community response to interacting disturbances - a case study of molehils and flooding in species-rich meadows

干扰对确定自然植物群落的结构和多样性至关重要。尽管有大量关于干扰的生态学研究，但仍然需要一个普遍的包容性范式。在这里，我们1)调查小尺度和大尺度干扰之间的差异和相互作用；2)寻找决定物种对干扰反应的关键生活史特征；3)明确研究干扰下的物种相互作用；4)测试植物类型方法在从单一物种反应到干扰到群落水平的有效性。我们的方法是将广泛的经验设置与基于计算机的植被动态模拟模型相结合。我们以物种丰富的湿润草甸为例进行研究，在那里，冬季洪水是规则的、大范围的扰动，而小鼠丘陵则是不规则的、小范围的扰动。虽然在中欧，鼹鼠是一种非常常见的干扰物，但它们在植物群落结构和植物共存中的作用尚未得到详细研究。我们的结果将大大增加我们对植物生活史如何与不同干扰类型相互作用以及干扰如何影响植物之间相互作用的理解。因此，这项研究解决了关于干扰和植物物种共存之间联系的普遍理论的重要障碍。

Disturbances are crucial for determining structure and diversity of natural plant communities. Despite the multitude of ecological studies on disturbances, there is still a need for a general inclusive paradigm. Here, we 1) investigate differences and interactions between small-scale and large-scale disturbances; 2) search for key life history traits determining a species' response to disturbance; 3) explicitly study species interactions under disturbance; and 4) test for the usefulness of a plant f al type approach in scaling up from single species response to disturbance to a community level. Our approach is a combination of an extensive empirical setup with a computer-based simulation model of vegetation dynamics. We use speciesrich wet meadows as case study, where winter floods act as regular, large-scale disturbances and molehills as irregular, small-scale disturbances. While moles constitute a very frequent disturbance agent in Central Europe, their role in structuring plant communities and faci litating coexistence has not been studied in detail. Our results will greatly increase our understanding about how a plant's life history interacts with different disturbance types, and how disturbances affect interactions among plants. Therefore, this study addresses important obstacles to a generalized theory about the links between disturbance and plant species coexistence.