Spatial patterns and ecological processes in plant community ecology
Understanding the ecological processes driving community assembly and species coexistence is a central goal in ecology, not only for fundamental knowledge, but also for conservation programs. Plant communities are shaped by deterministic and stochastic processes. These contrasting processes all contribute to specific spatial patterns of species distribution. Community spatial structures thus allow indirectly studying the processes of species coexistence and understanding forest dynamics and responses to changes in the environment. I will briefly present spatial eigenvector-based methods, a family of methods among the most powerful and accurate to detect complex multiscale spatial patterns in ecological data. These eigenvectors can be used as spatial predictors in combination with a set of relevant environmental variables in a framework of variation partitioning. I will highlight some recent contributions to these spatial methods and how these improved our capacity to link spatial patterns to ecological processes in plant communities.