Effects of Stress on Community Assemblages in Boreal Forests

Abstract

Two types of plant community assemblage have been studied: stochastic, or random, assemblage and niche?based assemblage. Communities experiencing high stress tend to show niche-based assembly and contain similar species due to high selective pressure for stress-tolerant traits. Stochastic-based assembly would be expected in low stress environments where community membership would not be "filtered" by the requirement for stress tolerance. Our goal was to determine if these assembly patterns held true for plant communities within the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota.