Aim Arbuscular mycorrhizas (AM) and ectomycorrhizas (ECM) have different impacts on nutrient cycling, carbon storage, community dynamics and enhancement of photosynthesis by rising CO 2 . Recent global analyses have concluded that patterns of AM/ECM dominance in forests worldwide are shaped by climate, with soil nutrients contributing negligible additional explanatory power. However, their reliance on nutrient data from GIS su...

Ectomycorrhizal (EM) associations can promote the dominance of tree species in otherwise diverse tropical forests. These EM associations between trees and their fungal mutualists have important consequences for soil organic matter cycling, yet the influence of these EM-associated effects on surrounding microbial communities is not well known, particularly in neotropical forests. We examined fungal and prokaryotic community com...

Canopy disturbance explains liana abundance and distribution within tropical forests and thus may also explain the widespread pattern of increasing liana abundance; however, this hypothesis remains untested. We used a 10‐year study (2007–2017) of 117,100 rooted lianas in an old‐growth Panamanian forest to test whether local canopy disturbance explains increasing liana abundance. We found that liana density increased 29.2% and...

Wood is a major carbon input into aquatic ecosystems and is thought to decay slowly, yet surprisingly little terrestrial carbon accumulates in marine sediments. A better mechanistic understanding of how habitat conditions and decomposer communities influence wood decay processes along the river–estuary–ocean continuum can address this seeming paradox. We measured mass loss, wood element, and polymer concentrations, quantified...

Seeds of tropical pioneer trees have chemical and physical characteristics that determine their capacity to persist in the soil seed bank. These traits allow seeds to survive in the soil despite diverse predators and pathogens, and to germinate and recruit even decades after dispersal. Defenses in seedlings and adult plants often are described in terms of tradeoffs between chemical and physical defense, but the interplay of de...

Tropical forests are renowned for their high diversity, yet in many sites a single tree species accounts for the majority of the individuals in a stand. An explanation for these monodominant forests remains elusive, but may be linked to mycorrhizal symbioses. We tested three hypotheses by which ectomycorrhizas might facilitate the dominance of the tree, Oreomunnea mexicana , in montane tropical forest in Panama. We tested whet...

Recent studies have provided evidence that trade‐offs in biomass allocation, resource‐use efficiency, and anti‐herbivore defense influence seedling performance and distribution across soil types. Our previous research suggested that soil nutrient availability acted as a filter for understory palm community assembly and species coexistence in a lower montane forest in western Panama. Here, we experimentally tested three potenti...

A trade‐off between growth and mortality rates characterizes tree species in closed canopy forests. This trade‐off is maintained by inherent differences among species and spatial variation in light availability caused by canopy‐opening disturbances. We evaluated conditions under which the trade‐off is expressed and relationships with four key functional traits for 103 tree species from Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The trade‐...

Aim Dispersal assembly and niche assembly are two competing theories proposed to explain the maintenance of species diversity in tropical forests. Dispersal theory emphasizes the role of chance colonization events and distance‐limited seed dispersal in explaining species abundance and distribution, whereas niche theory emphasizes differences among species in requirements for potentially limiting resources. Species distribution...