Patterns of species associations in woody plants in forest communities of Putuoshan Island, Zhejiang, China

Aims: Interspecific associations can reflect how species are assembled into communities. The objectives of this study were to examine the patterns of woody species co-occurrence and to determine how species' abundance would affect species associations. Methods: Data from a total of 23 plots were used to test the interspecific associations of 93 woody plant species in forest communities of Putuoshan Island in Zhejiang Province. We compared the observed species associations with the expected patterns at random, and correlated interspecific association intensities with co-dominance propensity of species pairs. Important findings: Species distribution co-varied among plots at the spatial scale of either 10 m × 10 m or 20 m × 20 m, but the majority of the 4 278 species pairs were not significantly associated. Interspecific association intensities were positively correlated with co-dominance propensity of species pairs, indicating that species abundance is a key factor affecting the interspecific co-occurrence. The observed values of variance ratio and the proportion of significantly associated species pairs consistently fell outside of the 2.5th-97.5th percentiles of random expectations (i.e. randomly permuting species across plots), suggesting that deterministic processes also play a role in species associations on the Putuoshan Island. We conclude that the pattern of woody species co-occurrence on Putuoshan Island are structured by both niche and stochastic processes.