Abstract
Biomass density is a key metric of vegetation abundance, but understanding how community assembly processes, such as environmental filtering and competitive exclusion, affect biomass distributions of coexisting species has proven logistically challenging. Here we apply airborne remote sensing to study the ecosystem‐scale distribution of species‐specific, woody plant biomass and its relation to topographic and hydrologic gradients in a South African savanna. We also spatially analyzed variation in biomass among species to understand patterns of coexistence, mapping the species and biomass over one million trees across 10 500 ha. We found the biomass of dominant woody species to be weakly but significantly related to environmental filters, where a combination of 10 topographic and edaphic variables accounted for