Fig 1.
Effect of elevation on Vaccinium myrtillus traits (a, b, c), of V. myrtillus shoot length on shrub cover (d), and of shrub cover on species richness (e) and beta-diversity (f).
Plots show the results of general linear mixed-effects models (a-e) and regression on distance matrices (i.e. floristic dissimilarity vs differences in shrub cover among all the pairwise combinations of the plots) (f). Confidence intervals (95%) are also shown (a-e). In the regression on distance matrices (f), the density of paired plots is represented by the intensity of the background color (smoothed scatter plot).
Fig 2.
Structural equation model diagram showing the hypothesized relationships among elevation (gray box) and Vaccinium myrtillus growth traits (a, purple boxes), shrub cover (b, yellow boxes) and species richness (c, blue boxes).
Solid lines indicate significant relationships (p<0.05), whereas dashed lines indicate tested relationships that were not statistically significant. Standardized effect size (i.e. scaled by mean and variance) of significant variables and conditional coefficient of determination (r2c) are also shown in the boxes.