Do plant modules describe community structure better than biomass? A comparison of three abundance measures

摘要

Plants are composed of modules, such as shoots and leaves. However, modules have been overlooked as potential abundance measures in describing plant communities. We sampled 8 communities, to examine whether module counts gave different conclusions from biomass on community structure, and better discriminated between communities. Different abundance measures - number of leaves, number of shoots and photosynthetic biomass - gave different results for between-site comparisons of evenness and rank consistency. Since evenness is intended to represent a feature of the whole community, it should vary more between communities than within; module-based abundance achieved this better than biomass. It is speculated that the restrictions on species co-occurrences when plant communities assemble may sometimes be based on the number of modules rather than on biomass.