Spatial distribution patterns and environmental interpretation of clonal buds

Abstract

Anthriscus sylvestris, a weed found both in Europe and China, is a kind of representative clustered clonal plant and is a foe on dams and banks. It has been widely investigated in Europe for its powerful progenitive ability and tolerance to severely adverse environments. Our aims were to investigate and quantify its spatial distribution patterns in four types of community habitats, using a clustering method and adjacency lattice established by Greig-Smith. We concluded our environmental interpretation based on canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) appended to a Monte Carlo test with randomized seeding. The results indicate that the buds around the parent roots are in an aggregation distribution pattern in all scales (0.002–5.12 m²), but theoretical distribution fitting, like negative binomial and Poisson distribution, show that some sizes of several sampling locations are out of place. For this, spatial ordination gives a satisfactory answer implying the effect of environmental variables such as depth of humus layer, soil moisture, light condition, disturbance intensity and herb abundance. CCA accounts for 64.7% of the total environmental variation and the remaining variation may be counteracted in those five variances or can be interpreted by other factors like accumulating temperature, annual rainfall and altitude in landscape scale. With the aid of temporal sequencing, the suppressed type II (monodominant) may be the former mode of suppressed type I (stable type), where invasion is done with the help of disturbance from both humans and nature. The abundance of A. sylvestris can add to our cognition in diversity resistance hypothesis and our hypothesis on disturbance before or upon immigration.

Keywords

Anthriscus sylvestris / spatial distribution pattern / cluster clonal plant / canonical correspondence analysis / buds / ramets