Yan Zhu

Chinese Academy of Sciences | CAS · Institute of Botany

Host specialization plays a critical role in the ecology and evolution of plant–microbe symbiosis. Theory predicts that host specialization is associated with microbial genome streamlining and is influenced by the abundance of host species, both of which can vary across latitudes, leading to a latitudinal gradient in host specificity. Here, we quan...

Aim: The equator-to-poles decline in the number of species, namely the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), is the most conspicuous pattern in biology, yet the underlying mechanisms of this pattern remain controversial. Species dispersal could have strong effects on large-scale species distributions but has rarely been considered in understanding...

Predicting and managing the structure and function of plant microbiomes requires quantitative understanding of community assembly and predictive models of spatial distributions at broad geographic scales. Here, we quantified the relative contribution of abiotic and biotic factors to the assembly of phyllosphere bacterial communities, and developed...

The complex spatial structure and dynamics of ecological communities continue to defy explanation by simple principles despite decades of attention from ecologists and theoreticians. For example, the relationship between plant spatial distributions and species coexistence is often challenging to resolve in empirical settings. By analysing the spati...

An important mechanism promoting species coexistence is conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD), which inhibits conspecific neighbors by accumulating host-specific enemies near adult trees. Natural enemies may be genotype-specific and regulate offspring dynamics more strongly than non-offspring, which is often neglected due to the difficulty...

Plant-associated microbes influence plant ecology, evolution, and ecosystem function, while explaining the diversity and abundance of these microbes at broad geographic scales remains problematic. Here we quantified the contribution of biotic and abiotic factors to the diversity and biogeography of leaf-associated bacteria on woody plants across a...

Environment and human land‐use both shape forest composition. Abiotic conditions sift tree species from a regional pool via functional traits that influence species’ suitability to the local environment. In addition, human land‐use can modify species distributions and change functional diversity of forests. However, it is unclear how environment an...

Species coexistence in diverse communities likely results from multiple interacting factors. Mechanisms such as conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD) and varying life-history strategies related to resource partitioning are known to influence plant fitness, and thereby community composition and diversity. However, we have little understandi...

Ecologists have long recognized that plant performance is affected by the density and composition of neighbouring individuals. With the advent of highly resolved species‐level phylogenies, it has become possible to test whether such density‐dependent neighbourhood interactions are also phylogenetically dependent. Most studies of density dependence...

Background/Question/Methods Determining the mechanisms underlying the assembly of diverse communities continues to be a central goal of ecology. While taxonomic diversity constitute the basis of most research in plant community ecology and are key to understanding biodiversity assembly mechanisms, the growing interest in using functional and phyl...

The Janzen–Connell hypothesis proposes that specialist natural enemies, such as herbivores and pathogens, maintain diversity in plant communities by reducing survival rates of conspecific seeds and seedlings located close to reproductive adults or in areas of high conspecific density. Variation in the strength of distance- and density-dependent eff...

Reference list for articles used in the meta-analysis.

R code used to conduct statistical analyses.

Study information and survival data for each test used in the meta-analysis.

R code used to make figures.

The Janzen-Connell hypothesis is among the most important theories put forward to explain species coexistence in species-rich communities. However, the relative importance of Janzen-Connell effects with respect to other prominent mechanisms of community assembly, such as dispersal limitation, self-thinning due to competition, or habitat association...

The following are typical communities in the secondary deciduous broad-leaved forests in the Dongling Mountain area: Quercus wutaishanica forest (QWF), Betula dahurica forest (BDF), Juglans mandshurica forest (JMF) and mixed forest (MF). Comprehensive research on species composition and community structure of these four forest types will contribute...

Exploring tree population distribution patterns and interspecific spatial associations are helpful in elucidating the mechanisms underlying species coexistence in forest communities. We analyzed population distribution patterns and interspecific adult–adult spatial associations of common tree species at scales of 0–50 m in five 1-ha warm temperate...

Although negative conspecific density dependence among neighbours is widely studied, the general prevalence of the effects is still poorly understood due to a lack of studies from zonal forests other than the tropics. In addition, the detection of density dependence may be confounded by the influence of habitat heterogeneity. Here we examined the s...

The negative density-dependent hypothesis focuses mainly on conspecific interactions to explain the coexistence of diverse species in natural communities. The hypothesis describes the impairment of performance among conspecific individuals due to resource competition, predation of pests (e.g., pathogen, herbivore)and so on. Impairment of conspecifi...