Community assembly during vegetation succession after metal mining is driven by multiple processes with temporal...

Area of Science:

• Ecological restoration
• Community assembly
• Environmental science

Background:

• Understanding community assembly is crucial for ecological restoration, especially after severe disturbances.
• Severe anthropogenic disturbances, like metal mining, leave no biological legacy and create significant environmental problems.
• A systematic understanding of community assembly following such disturbances is currently lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore community assembly processes after metal mining disturbance.
• To gain insight into assembly rules associated with severe anthropogenic disturbance.
• To identify the ecological processes driving vegetation succession in metal-mined areas.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a chronosequence approach to study vegetation patches at different successional stages.
• Collected data on eight plant functional traits, categorized as establishment and regenerative traits.
• Employed null models to identify assembly processes driving succession.

Main Results:

• Establishment and regenerative traits initially converged during primary succession.
• Establishment traits shifted towards neutral assembly, while regeneration traits showed convergence and divergence as succession progressed.
• After 20 years, observed establishment traits matched expected values, but regenerative traits diverged significantly.

Conclusions:

• In early succession on abandoned metal mines, plant communities are influenced by metal content and dispersal limitation.
• As environmental conditions improve, interspecific interactions may play a larger role.
• Stochastic processes become dominant in vegetation assembly more than 20 years after severe metal mining disturbance.