5. Conclusions
Our study found that at a broad landscape scale, the distribution of regenerated individuals in the D. pectinatum community is related to differences in climatic conditions. Variation in precipitation and temperature due to latitude, longitude and elevation is the dominant cause for the formation of the regeneration dynamic pattern along distinct environmental axes, and the intermediate environmental conditions in the mid-elevation area contribute to regeneration. At the community level, habitat preferences related to elevational factors, TN, AP and forest gaps play a key role in regeneration success. In addition, biological mechanisms (negative density-limiting effects) also have a particularly important effect on the regeneration of the community.
Funding This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Non-profit Research Institution of CAF (CAFBB2017ZB004).
Author Contributions Haodong Liu performed the experiments, analyzed the data, and wrote and revised the manuscript. Qiao Chen, Zhiyang Xu, Yunchuan Dai, Yang Liu, Huayu Li, Juan Wang, and Xi Peng analyzed the data. Yongfu Chen conceived and designed the experiments, supervised the study and revised the paper.
Acknowledgments We would like to thank all relevant personnel for their help in data processing. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped to improve this paper. We would also like to extend our thanks to the many local staff members at the Bawangling, Diaoluoshan, and Jianfengling National Nature Reserves who helped us conduct the challenging fieldwork.
Conflicts of Interest The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The manuscript has never been partly or entirely published in or submitted to any other journals. All of the authors agree to the submission of this paper.
Data availability statement All authors agreed to deposit data from this manuscript to a public repository. Data are submitted to Dryad, and DOI number is https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.nvx0k6dpf.