DOI: 10.5061/dryad.n2z34tn54
title: Mechanisms of coexistence: Exploring species sorting and character displacement in woody plants to alleviate belowground competition

description: Rarely do we observe competitive exclusion within plant communities, even
 though plants compete for a limited pool of resources. Thus, our
 understanding of the mechanisms sustaining plant biodiversity might be
 limited. In this study, we explore two common ecological strategies,
 species sorting and character displacement, that promote coexistence by
 reducing competition. We assess the degree to which woody plants may
 implement these two strategies to lower belowground competition for
 nutrients which occurs via nutritional (mostly mycorrhizal) mutualisms.
 First, we compile data on plant traits and the mycorrhizal association
 state of woody angiosperms using a global inventory of indigenous flora.
 Our analysis reveals that species in locations with high mycorrhizal
 diversity exhibit distinct mean values in leaf area and wood density based
 on their mycorrhizal type, indicating species sorting. Second, we
 reanalyze a large dataset on leaf area to demonstrate that in areas with
 high mycorrhizal diversity, trees maintain divergent leaf area values,
 showcasing character displacement. Character displacement among plants is
 considered rare, making our observation significant. In summary, our study
 uncovers a rare occurrence of character displacement and identifies a
 common mechanism employed by plants to alleviate competition, shedding
 light on the complexities of plant coexistence in diverse ecosystems.
description: All analyses were carried out to the subset of Angiosperms that
 were classified as woody species. We obtained data on leaf Area, tree
 height, leaf mass per area (LMA), and seed mass trait values from the
 Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset (Díaz <em>et
 al.</em>, 2022), and wood density information from the International
 Centre for Research on Agroforestry (World Agroforestry 2023). The
 selection of plant traits for our analysis was a compromise between
 feasibility, yielding information for divergent sets of plant species, and
 covering the three documented sets of autocorrelated traits: the leaf
 economics spectrum, the wood economics spectrum, and the root economics
 spectrum. Lists of indigenous species per location were extracted from The
 Global Naturalized Alien Flora database, a global inventory (van Kleunen
 <em>et al.</em>, 2019). To assess leaf area variability across
 plant species' distribution ranges, we utilized the SLA dataset from
 Wright et al. (2017). Mycorrhizal association type information was
 retrieved at a plant family level as published in Delavaux et al. (2019).
 We assigned a fixed mycorrhizal state for a species only if at least 40%
 of the records in Delavaux et al. (2019) matched a single mycorrhizal
 association type. All analyses focused on woody species, and mycorrhizal
 association types were reclassified into arbuscular mycorrhiza,
 non-arbuscular mycorrhiza, mixes (arbuscular mycorrhizal and other
 mycorrhizal types), and non-mycorrhizal (Fig. 1). Trees not forming any
 mycorrhiza were excluded from further consideration due to their limited
 presence in most analyses.
description: # Mechanisms of coexistence: exploring species sorting and character
 displacement in woody plants to alleviate belowground competition.
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n2z34tn54](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n2z34tn54) Most of the guidelines are available on the attached R script. All data are actually publically available and we derive information, whenever possible, from the original datasets. We included here only two files that required extensive processing which we could not integrate to the code. The two files contain multiple "null" values, which should be replaced by empty cells before running the code. **coords.submit.csv** contains coordinates at a crude resolution for all the sites in the Naturalized Alien Flora database for whch we could do the matching.  **mycorrhizaandwd.csv** contains wood density and mycorrhizal type information that we extracted from the following two sources: World Agroforestry and Delavaux et al., 2019. ## Description of the data and file structure **coords.submit.csv** contains five columns comprising the region_id, code and name from the original files in the Naturalized Alien Flora database and the latitude and longitude which we derived manually in a decimal format. The file is currently optimized for loading into R with the attached code. There are known issues with coords with "null" values. Both of these correspond to locations for which we could not accurately identify coordinates. **mycorrhizaandwd.csv** contains six columns comprising the TRY.30.AccSpecies.ID of the species, the species names and family the mycorrhizal type with the highest probability that we found in Delaveaux et al. (2019) and the respective probability (columns Mycorrhizal.type and value) as well as the extracted wood density (column wd). Some entries contain missing values that they manifest themselves with "null" values. **submittedCodeVeresoglouetal.R** (zenodo) contains reproducible code to recreate the main display items of the article. ## Sharing/Access information This is a section for linking to other ways to access the data, and for linking to sources the data is derived from, if any. Data was derived from the following sources: * **Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset**: Díaz et al., 2022 DOI: 10.17871/TRY.81 **Wood density information**: World Agroforestry 2023 [https://www.worldagroforestry.org/output/wood-density-database](https://www.worldagroforestry.org/output/wood-density-database) **Mycorrhizal Status of Plants**: Delavaux et al., 2019 DOI: abs/10.1002/ecy.2542 **Naturalized Alien Flora database**: van Kleunen et al., 2019 DOI:10.1002/ecy.2542 **Leaf area dataset**: Wright et al. 2017 DOI: 10.1126/science.aal4760