Fig 1.
Location map of 23 transects (circles), showing the town of San José de Ocoa.
The overlapping points are depicted slightly displaced from their actual positions to ensure that all become visible. The circles filled black depict transects in which clusters of high abundance of plants were detected. The layout of Transect 11 (T11) is shown as an example in Fig 2. The background is a color shaded-relief view (red-white is highland, green is lowland) based on a 30-m SRTM DEM (Ref: NASA LP DAAC, 2000. SRTM 1 Arc-Second Global. https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/. Published September 2014). The bottom-left inset shows the area in the context of the Dominican Republic.
Fig 2.
Layout of Transect 11 (T11) showing quadrats sized 2 m × 2 m (4 m2) (gap at the center).
Circles are individuals, each color represents a species. Q1, Q2,…, Q24, Q25 codes inside grey shaded squares, are quadrats ID. S and N account for the species number and the total abundance in each quadrat, respectively. Tick marks on the top margin indicate the transect length in meters.
Table 1.
Quadrats with significant association (to α = 0.05) between high observed values of density of individuals and high lagged respectives ones, so called “spatial clusters of type High-High” or HH clusters.
Fig 3.
Panel of Moran scatterplots for lagged densities of individuals (ldN) against non lagged respectives (dN).
Each scatterplot represents a transect and dots represent quadrats; those spatially associated with high values surrounded by high (so called HH clusters) are coloured in red. A regression grey line is also plotted. HH clusters quadrats are coloured in red, of which only 16 are visible, 2 less than the actual number, because overlap of dots (T16Q01/T16Q03 and T20Q16/T20Q21).
Fig 4.
LISA cluster map showing 575 quadrats (from 23 transects), each classified as clusters High-High (red), Low-Low (blue) and “not significant” (grey), regarding to their density of individuals.
Even though each row represents one transect, the transects were not placed adjacent to one another. See text for details.
Table 2.
Comparison of traits between entire sample, High-High clusters and the rest of the sample, in terms of richness, abundance, area, and percentage of individuals and density by growth habit.
See text for details.
Fig 5.
Density of individuals vs. their species growth habit type, for three types grouping criteria of the quadrats according to their spatial association of individuals.
(A) Entire sample, or undifferentiated spatial association; (B) High-High clusters; (C) Rest of the sample, or non-aggregated pattern of individuals. Legend: Tr, trees; Sh, shrubs; Pl, palms; ViCac, vines and cacti. See text for details.
Table 3.
Rank-abundance tables of the 17th most abundant species present in at least 3 quadrats for both HH clusters (left half of the table) and the rest of the sample (right half of the table).
Each group has 17 species. See text for details.
Fig 6.
Ordination plot from Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) of the 18 HH clusters quadrats, showing only the 17th most abundant species (from 61) present in at least 3 quadrats.
Names boxes are coloured according to growth habit in the case of species, and underlying rock type for quadrats. See text for details.
Fig 7.
Ordination plot from Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the 18 HH clusters quadrats, showing only the 17th most abundant species (from 61) present in at least 3 quadrats.
Names boxes are coloured according to growth habit in the case of species, and underlying rock type for quadrats. See text for details.
Fig 8.
Cluster dendrogram of the 18 HH clusters quadrats using the unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages (UPGMA), indicating the approximately unbiased p-values (AU) and bootstrap probabilities (BP), generated by the multiscale bootstrap resampling algorithm.
See text for details.