Effects of arrival order and seed size on germination of grassland plants: Are there assembly rules during recruitment?

Assembly rules provide a tool to simplify the complexity of interactions that shape ecological communities. The prime objective of this study was to examine an experimental approach to the study of assembly rules, and also to examine some premises of such rules. We investigated possible assembly rules pertaining to interactions among seeds and seedlings during germination. An experiment was made on randomly sampled species pairs from a larger pool of grassland species differing in seed size, and included treatments altering the presence and ordering of species arrival (seed sowing), and nutrient level. The basic premises suggested for the rules were that a congruence exists among species in the response of germination: (i) to environmental variation; and (ii) to the presence of other species. Both of these premises were supported. In nine of 11 investigated species, germination responded to sowing treatments. Germination was commonly enhanced in species sown after another species. Inclusion of a third species did not alter two-species interactions during germination, indicating that increasing complexity may not change fundamental rules of assembly. Seed size had no systematic effect on how species behaved in the germination treatments. We suggest that assembly rules during recruitment may be useful for understanding pattern and process in plant communities, and that a method with random sampling of two-species interactions is useful to handle the complexity of multi-species communities. However, studies under field conditions are necessary to make further advances in the formulation of realistic assembly rules.