Associations of Biotic and Abiotic Factors with Phylogenetic Community Structure Across Temperate Forests in South Korea

Understanding how environmental conditions, functional composition, and species richness jointly relate to phylogenetic community structure is important for sustainable forest management under environmental change. Using 2858 plots from the 7th National Forest Inventory of South Korea, phylogenetic community structure as the standardized effect size of mean pairwise phylogenetic distance (SES.MPD) was quantified for broadleaved, conifer, and mixed stands. Associations between SES.MPD and abiotic factors such as elevation, mean annual precipitation, stand age, as well as biotic factors such as species richness and community-weighted means of specific leaf area and maximum height were assessed using multi-model inference and piecewise structural equation models (pSEM). Across stand types, SES.MPD values in most plots were not significantly different from the null-model baseline under the chosen randomization procedure, indicating weak net departures from null-model-relative phylogenetic dispersion at the national scale; meanwhile, mean SES.MPD tended to be slightly negative in broadleaved stands and positive in conifer and mixed stands. In multi-model inference analysis, the strongest associations with SES.MPD differed among stand types: trait composition—especially community-weighted specific leaf area—showed the strongest association in total stands and broadleaved stands, whereas species richness was the dominant correlate in mixed stands and precipitation showed the strongest association in conifer stands. The pSEM revealed that elevation, precipitation, and stand age were linked to SES.MPD largely through indirect pathways via trait composition and species richness, consistent with trait- and richness-mediated environmental filtering. These results highlight stand-type-specific linkages among environment, traits, richness, and phylogenetic structure and support trait- and phylogeny-informed forest management and restoration to enhance resilience under ongoing environmental change.