近来，中科院华南植物园保育生态学研究组李林博士研究生在叶万辉、黄忠良等研究员及加拿大Alberta大学何芳良教授指导下，以广东鼎湖山森林生态系统国家野科学观测站的南亚热带常绿阔叶林20公顷监测样地为基地，采用国际先进的O-ring统计方法，分析了样地中多度大于10的所有物种进行分布格局，讨论了各种导致现有格局产生的原因，并与热带地区的研究结果进行比较，从而得出了南亚热带常绿阔叶林物种的普遍分布格局，格局变化的规律，以及产生这种格局的主要机制。
经过长期研究发现：聚集分布在样地中起到绝对优势，物种的聚集比例随着尺度的增加而下降；显著聚集比例从丰富种、中间种，再到偶见种依次下降，偶见种比常见种更加聚集，大径级物种的聚集程度下降；种子特征决定了物种的空间分布格局，种子扩散模式影响到物种的空间分布，由动物和风力两种方式共同传播的物种，聚集程度小于分别由动物或风力传播的物种。综合以上结果，得出了如下结论：种子分散限制、自疏作用和生境异质性是导致样地中物种现存格局的主要因素，也是维持南亚热带常绿阔叶林物种共存的主要机制。
其相关研究成果已发表在世界著名科学期刊Oikos上。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原始出处：
Oikos 2 Jul 2009 DOI:10.1111/j.1600-0706.2009.17233.x
Community differentiation on landscapes: drift, migration and speciation
Xin-Sheng Hu, Fangliang He and Stephen P. Hubbell,
Correspondence to X.-S. Hu and F. He, Dept of Renewable Resources, 751 General Service Building, Univ. of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada. – S. P. Hubbell, Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 621 Charles E. Young Drive, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1601, USA, and Smithsonian Tropical Research Inst., Unit 0948, APO AA 34002-0948, Panama.
Theories of the differentiation of ecological communities on landscapes have typically not considered evolutionary dynamics. Here we analytically study the expected differentiation among local communities in a large metacommunity, undergoing speciation, ecological drift and intercommunity dispersal, in the context of neutral theory. We demonstrate that heterogeneity in species diversity and abundance arises among communities when local communities are small and intercommunity migration is infrequent. We propose a new measure to describe community differentiation, defined as the average correlation or the average probability (Cst) that two randomly sampled individuals of the same species within local communities are from the same ancestor. The effects of driving forces (migration, mutation, and ecological drift) are incorporated into the two-level hierarchical community structure in a finite island model of neutral communities. Community differentiation can increase the effective metacommunity size or the Hubbell's fundamental species diversity in the metacommunity by a factor (1?Cst)?1. Significant community differentiation arises when Cst≠0. Intercommunity migration promotes species diversity in local communities but reduce species diversity in the metacommunity. In either the finite or infinite island case, one can estimate the number of intercommunity migrants by using multiple local community datasets when the speciation is negligible in the neutral local communities, or by using the metacommunity dataset when the speciation is included in the local neutral communities. These results highlight the significance of the evolutionary mechanisms in generating heterogeneous communities in the absence of complicated ecological processes on large landscapes.
