Explaining diversity patterns of forest community through species interactions

Niche theory,the neutral theory and nearly neutral theory tend to explain community assemblage mechanism at the community level. Theoretical foundations explaining the phenomenon of community ecology using species interactions and population dynamics theory are still very weak. Establishing relations between population ecology and community ecology and integrating the theories of population ecology and community ecology,will greatly promote the rapid development of the theories on community assemblage. This paper reviewed the development of community assemblage theories,including ecological niche theory and the neutral theory,and mainly sorted out research advances of community assemblage based on the population dynamics and species interactions. Population dynamics processes include birth,death,immigration and emigration. On the basis of basic population dynamics process,the species abundance distribution can be described by Dirichlet model and neutral theory model. With individual species-area relationship( ISAR) model and Ripley K function,describing species richness around target species at different scales from the perspective of individual plant becomes realized. Asymmetric competition is common in adjacent relations of plant communities,which presents the unequal allocations of resources among the competitive plants. Combining ISAR model and the phenomenon of asymmetric competition,the evaluation methods and theories regarding the assemblage of neighborhood diversity were discussed from the perspective of species interactions.