A series of new advances have been made in the study of the effects of roads in Chengdu on the taxonomy, functional and phylogenetic diversity of mountain plants

Worldwide, mountain areas are not only areas of biodiversity enrichment, but also places
of socio-economic underdevelopment.
In order to support and promote the socio-economic development of the region, roads are gradually extending into more pristine mountainous areas and becoming an increasingly common and influential form of
human disturbance in natural ecosystems.
A comprehensive understanding of the impact of mountain trails on plant diversity is key
to finding the most effective solutions for managing this particular driver.
However, although roads are considered to be one of the most important disturbing factors of plant diversity in Qionglai Mountain, little is known about how roads affect the diversity of plant taxonomy, function, and phylogeny at the same time
.

The project team of land surface processes and ecosystem management in the field of biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, used systematic sampling method to investigate plant communities in the wild, compared the three-dimensional plant diversity of roadside and internal communities at the landscape scale, and analyzed the effect difference of road in three-dimensional plant diversity and the causal relationship between three-dimensional beta diversity in the background of road disturbance.
A series of important research results
have been achieved.
Firstly, the difference in the effect of mountain roads on three-dimensional alpha and beta diversity was clarified, and it was found that roads varied greatly in the taxonomic and functional alpha diversity of dominant species and common species, while the phylogenetic alpha of rare species Diversity varies the most; But these effects tend to be non-random in terms of functional characteristics and phylogeny, and some ancient species or species with certain functional characteristics have a higher
risk of loss.
Secondly, the negative impact of roads on classification and functional alpha diversity at medium and high altitudes was greater than that at low altitudes.
The influence of roads on phylogenetic alpha diversity at medium and low altitudes is greater than that at high
altitudes.
In addition, compared with internal plant communities, roads negatively affected roadside communities in classification, function and phylogenetic beta diversity, and the decline in basal weighted phylogenetic beta diversity was the largest
。 In the context of mountain road disturbance, we verify the hypothesis
that "anthropogenic interference affects functional diversity through environmental sieve effect, and then affects phylogenetic diversity through phylogenetic signals of functional traits, and both jointly drive the change of community classification diversity".

The relevant research results are "Assessing the effect of roads on mountain plant diversity beyond species richness" and " Understanding the taxonomic homogenization of road-influenced plant assemblages in the Qionglai mountain range: A functional and phylogenetic perspective" was published in Frontiers in Plant Science (IF=6.
627).

Dr.
Li Honglin from the Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences is the first author of the related paper, and Professor Luo Peng and Dr.
Yang Hao are the co-corresponding authors
of the related paper.
This research was jointly funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0503305), the project of the Provincial Department of Science and Technology (2018SZDX0036) and the project of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (2019HJ2096001006).

Original link 1

Original link 2

Figure 1 shows the advantages (q=0), common (q=1) and rare (q=2) of roads Plant taxonomy, function, and phylogenetic diversity of species were effected on the coastal pull-out gradient for 95% confidence interval model prediction (line).

The solid red line indicates the prediction of the internal community, and the black dashed line is used for the prediction
of the roadside community.