Effect of species dispersal and environmental factors on species assemblages in grassland communities

The construction mechanisms of plant communities are a hot topic in the field of ecology. However, the question of how communities are constructed has not yet been adequately explained. Whether these mechanisms are driven by niche theory, neutral theory, or a combination of the two has been confirmed in a variety of research studies; most of them concentrated on the study of tropical rain forests. So we looket at grassland communities on China's Loess Plateau as example, hoping to provide some grounds for answering this question in this paper. Three different grass habitats were selected; land which had been abandoned for five years, north-facing slopes and south-facing slopes. The Mantel test analysis was applied to test the correlation between similarity in community composition, geographic distance and environment distance. The result of our research suggested that geographic distance has a significant effect on the community composition (P