FIGURE 2 Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) for clonal (a) and non-clonal species (b), with species occupancy identified by non-acquisitive persistence-related trait values (with direction reported by dashed lines and names). NMDS stress: for clonal species = 0.029, for non-clonal species = 0.127 – both indicating a good fitting of the two-dimensional scaling.
Zooming into the links between single traits and single predictors for clonal species, the variance explained by predictors for the most important relationships ranged between 17% and 65% (Table 3). The most consistent relationships were found for the target effect and soil depth CV with BDMC, which exhibited strong positive links across all species. Plant height and lateral spread proved less affected by environmental and insularity factors than BDMC and with less consistent patterns (Table 3).
TABLE 3 Results of the OLS regressions for the five clonal species. Sign (arrow direction), significance (p-value: ** ≤ 0.01; * ≤ 0.05; . ≤ 0.1) and strength (R2 values) of single trait-single predictor links are reported. Only the most important relationships (based on the model coefficient, 95% confidence interval, significance, R2) are indicated – refer to Supplemental Material 2 for further model summary statistics.