The relationship between plant functional traits and demographic performance forms the
foundation of trait-based ecology. It also serves as the natural linkage between trait-based …

Functional traits offer a potential avenue to generalize and forecast the impacts of changing
competition on plant communities, including changing outcomes of competition among …

Aims Trait-based coexistence theories are useful to explain community processes. The aim
was to distinguish which theory played a more important role in explaining the invasion …

Do species and functional trait diversity respond similarly to deterministic and random
processes? Theory predicts that the contributions of random and deterministic processes to …

The distribution of biodiversity depends on the combined and interactive effects of ecological
and evolutionary processes. The joint contribution of these processes has focused almost …

When can small, isolated populations overcome the negative consequences of rarity?
Despite considerable effort to understand threats to rare species, few studies consider how …

My goal for this thesis was to better understand the mechanisms of community assembly and
the processes underlying spatial and temporal patterns of species and functional diversity …

Plant communities that occur on edaphically heterogeneous landscapes are ideal systems
for exploring questions of niche and community assembly. Species with affinity for harsh …

Method Using a dominant species in semi-arid Inner Mongolia Steppe, Leymus chinensis,
as the target species and ten other species as neighbors, we carried out a two-year …