L. POORTER results 27
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Dominance and rarity in tree communities across the globe: Patterns, predictors and threatsNARA Subscribed
Aim Ecological and anthropogenic factors shift the abundances of dominant and rare tree species within local forest communities, thus affecting species composition and ecosystem functioning. To inform forest and conservation management it is important to understand the drivers of dominance and rarity in local tree communities. We answer the following research questions: (1) What are the patterns of dominance and rarity in tree...
Tropical forest succession increases tree taxonomic and functional richness but decreases evennessNARA Subscribed
Aim Successional changes in functional diversity provide insights into community assembly by indicating how species are filtered into local communities based on their traits. Here, we assess successional changes in taxonomic and functional richness, evenness and redundancy along gradients of climate, soil pH and forest cover. Location Neotropics. Time period Last 0–100 years. Major taxa studied Trees. Methods We used 22 forest...
Tree demographic strategies largely overlap across succession in Neotropical wet and dry forest communitiesNARA Subscribed
Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role in carbon budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the demographic strategies—combinations of growth, mortality and recruitment rates—of the tree species in the community. However, our understanding of de...
Successional shifts in tree demographic strategies in wet and dry Neotropical forestsNARA Subscribed
Aim Tropical forest succession and associated changes in community composition are driven by species demographic rates, but how demographic strategies shift during succession remains unclear. Our goal was to identify generalities in demographic trade‐offs and successional shifts in demographic strategies across Neotropical forests that cover a large rainfall gradient and to test whether the current conceptual model of tropical...
Data capturing multiple axes of tree size and shape, such as a tree's stem diameter, height and crown size, underpin a wide range of ecological research—from developing and testing theory on forest structure and dynamics, to estimating forest carbon stocks and their uncertainties, and integrating remote sensing imagery into forest monitoring programmes. However, these data can be surprisingly hard to come by, particularly for...
Aim Water availability is the major driver of tropical forest structure and dynamics. Most research has focused on the impacts of climatic water availability, whereas remarkably little is known about the influence of water table depth and excess soil water on forest processes. Nevertheless, given that plants take up water from the soil, the impacts of climatic water supply on plants are likely to be modulated by soil water con...
MetaPhenomics: quantifying the many ways plants respond to their abiotic environment, using light intensity as an exampleNARA Subscribed
Thousands of scientific papers have described how plants responded to different levels of a given environmental factor, for a wide variety of physiological processes and morphological, anatomical or chemical characteristics. There is a clear need to summarize this information in a structured and comparable way through meta-analysis. This paper describes how to use relative trait responses from many independent experiments to c...
Understanding how evolutionary history and the coordination between trait trade‐off axes shape the drought tolerance of trees is crucial to predict forest dynamics under climate change. Here, we compiled traits related to drought tolerance and the fast‐slow and stature‐recruitment trade‐off axes in 601 tropical woody species to explore their covariations and phylogenetic signals. We found that xylem resistance to embolism (P50...
Pantropical variability in tree crown allometryNARA Subscribed
Aim Tree crowns determine light interception, carbon and water exchange. Thus, understanding the factors causing tree crown allometry to vary at the tree and stand level matters greatly for the development of future vegetation modelling and for the calibration of remote sensing products. Nevertheless, we know little about large‐scale variation and determinants in tropical tree crown allometry. In this study, we explored the co...
The global abundance of tree palmsNARA Subscribed
Aim Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) and in terms of responses to climate change. We quantified global patterns of tree...
Competition influences tree growth, but not mortality, across environmental gradients in Amazonia and tropical AfricaNARA Subscribed
Competition among trees is an important driver of community structure and dynamics in tropical forests. Neighboring trees may impact an individual tree’s growth rate and probability of mortality, but large‐scale geographic and environmental variation in these competitive effects has yet to be evaluated across the tropical forest biome. We quantified effects of competition on tree‐level basal area growth and mortality for trees...
Aim Predictions of plant traits over space and time are increasingly used to improve our understanding of plant community responses to global environmental change. A necessary step forward is to assess the reliability of global trait predictions. In this study, we predict community mean plant traits at the global scale and present a systematic evaluation of their reliability in terms of the accuracy of the models, ecological r...
TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open accessNARA Subscribed
Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodivers...
Estimating aboveground net biomass change for tropical and subtropical forests: Refinement of IPCC default rates using forest plot dataNARA Subscribed
As countries advance in greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting for climate change mitigation, consistent estimates of aboveground net biomass change (∆AGB) are needed. Countries with limited forest monitoring capabilities in the tropics and subtropics rely on IPCC 2006 default ∆AGB rates, which are values per ecological zone, per continent. Similarly, research into forest biomass change at a large scale also makes use of these rates....
Compositional response of Amazon forests to climate changeNARA Subscribed
Most of the planet's diversity is concentrated in the tropics, which includes many regions undergoing rapid climate change. Yet, while climate‐induced biodiversity changes are widely documented elsewhere, few studies have addressed this issue for lowland tropical ecosystems. Here we investigate whether the floristic and functional composition of intact lowland Amazonian forests have been changing by evaluating records from 106...
Allometric equations for integrating remote sensing imagery into forest monitoring programmesNARA Subscribed
Remote sensing is revolutionizing the way we study forests, and recent technological advances mean we are now able – for the first time – to identify and measure the crown dimensions of individual trees from airborne imagery. Yet to make full use of these data for quantifying forest carbon stocks and dynamics, a new generation of allometric tools which have tree height and crown size at their centre are needed. Here, we compil...
Understanding the processes that determine above‐ground biomass ( AGB ) in Amazonian forests is important for predicting the sensitivity of these ecosystems to environmental change and for designing and evaluating dynamic global vegetation models ( DGVM s). AGB is determined by inputs from woody productivity [woody net primary productivity ( NPP )] and the rate at which carbon is lost through tree mortality. Here, we test whet...
Testing for functional convergence of temperate rainforest tree assemblages in Chile and New ZealandNARA Subscribed
An important tenet of biogeography and comparative ecology is that disjunct assemblages in similar physical environments are functionally more similar to each other than to assemblages from other environments. Temperate rainforests in South America, New Zealand and Australia share certain physiognomic similarities, but we are not aware of any statistical evidence that these disjunct plant assemblages share a distinctive suite...
Diversity enhances carbon storage in tropical forestsNARA Subscribed
Aim Tropical forests store 25% of global carbon and harbour 96% of the world's tree species, but it is not clear whether this high biodiversity matters for carbon storage. Few studies have teased apart the relative importance of forest attributes and environmental drivers for ecosystem functioning, and no such study exists for the tropics. Location Neotropics. Methods We relate aboveground biomass ( AGB ) to forest attributes...
BAAD: a Biomass And Allometry Database for woody plantsNARA Subscribed
Understanding how plants are constructed—i.e., how key size dimensions and the amount of mass invested in different tissues varies among individuals—is essential for modeling plant growth, carbon stocks, and energy fluxes in the terrestrial biosphere. Allocation patterns can differ through ontogeny, but also among coexisting species and among species adapted to different environments. While a variety of models dealing with bio...
Sapling performance along resource gradients drives tree species distributions within and across tropical forestsNARA Subscribed
Niche differentiation is a major hypothesized determinant of species distributions, but its practical importance is heavily debated and its underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Trait‐based approaches have been used to infer niche differentiation and predict species distributions. For understanding underlying mechanisms, individual traits should be scaled up to whole‐plant performance, which has rarely been done. We mea...
Markedly divergent estimates of A mazon forest carbon density from ground plots and satellitesNARA Subscribed
Aim The accurate mapping of forest carbon stocks is essential for understanding the global carbon cycle, for assessing emissions from deforestation, and for rational land‐use planning. Remote sensing ( RS ) is currently the key tool for this purpose, but RS does not estimate vegetation biomass directly, and thus may miss significant spatial variations in forest structure. We test the stated accuracy of pantropical carbon maps...
Productive leaf functional traits of Chinese savanna speciesNARA Subscribed
TRY – a global database of plant traitsNARA Subscribed
Plant traits – the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants and their organs – determine how primary producers respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, influence ecosystem processes and services and provide a link from species richness to ecosystem functional diversity. Trait data thus represent the raw material for a wide range of research from evol...