Conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD) strongly influences plant demography, especially in highly diverse tropical forests, but its relative importance may vary between growth forms. We used hierarchical Bayesian models to assess how neighbor densities affected the survival of more than 30,000 seedlings from 87 tree and 56 liana species in a tropical forest across two 1‐year census intervals. Although standardized CNDD...

Enhanced silicate rock weathering (ERW) is an emerging strategy for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. ERW aims at promoting soil inorganic carbon sequestration by accelerating geochemical weathering processes. Theoretically, ERW may also impact soil organic carbon (SOC), the largest carbon pool in terrestrial ecosystems, but experimental evidence for this is largely lack...

Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) has been proposed as a measure to enhance the carbon (C)‐sequestration potential and fertility of soils. The effects of this practice on the soil phosphorus (P) pools and the general mechanisms affecting microbial P cycling, as well as plant P uptake are not well understood. Here, the impact of ERW on soil P availability and microbial P cycling functional groups and root P‐acquisition traits were...

To understand soil biodiversity we need to know how soil communities are assembled. However, the relationship between soil community assembly and environmental factors, and the linkages between soil microbiota taxonomic groups and their body sizes, remain unexplored in tropical seasonal rainforests. Systematic and stratified random sampling was used to collect 243 soil and organism samples across a 20‐ha plot in a tropical sea...

Trait‐based approaches have been extensively used in community ecology to provide a mechanistic understanding of the drivers of community assembly. However, a foundational assumption of the trait framework, traits relate to performance, has been mainly examined through univariate relationships that simplify the complex phenotypic integration of organisms. We evaluate a conceptual framework in which traits are organized hierarc...

The functional trait values that constitute a whole‐plant phenotype interact with the environment to determine demographic rates. Current approaches often fail to explicitly consider trait × trait and trait × environment interactions, which may lead to missed information that is valuable for understanding and predicting the drivers of demographic rates and functional diversity. Here, we consider these interactions by modeling...

Aim The relationship between the proportion of sites occupied by a species and the area of a site [occupancy–area relationship (OAR)] offers key information for biodiversity management and has long fascinated ecologists. We quantified the variation in OAR for 3,157 woody species in 17 forest plots worldwide and tested the relative importance of environment and species traits for explaining this variation and evaluated overall...

It is critical to accurately estimate carbon (C) turnover time as it dominates the uncertainty in ecosystem C sinks and their response to future climate change. In the absence of direct observations of ecosystem C losses, C turnover times are commonly estimated under the steady state assumption ( SSA ), which has been applied across a large range of temporal and spatial scales including many at which the validity of the assump...

Climate is widely recognised as an important determinant of the latitudinal diversity gradient. However, most existing studies make no distinction between direct and indirect effects of climate, which substantially hinders our understanding of how climate constrains biodiversity globally. Using data from 35 large forest plots, we test hypothesised relationships amongst climate, topography, forest structural attributes (stem ab...

Intra‐specific negative density dependence promotes species coexistence by regulating population sizes. Patterns consistent with such density dependence are frequently reported in diverse tropical tree communities. Empirical evidence demonstrating whether intra‐specific variation is related to these patterns, however, is lacking. The present study addresses this important knowledge gap by genotyping all individuals of a tropic...

Aim Determining the drivers of species rarity is fundamental for understanding and conserving biodiversity. Rarity of a given species within its community may arise due to exclusion by other ecologically similar species. Conversely, rare species may occupy habitats that are rare in the landscape or they may be ill‐suited to all available habitats. The first mechanism would lead to common and rare species occupying similar ecol...

Trait‐based studies in community ecology have generally focused on the community as a unit where all species occur due to stochasticity, determinism or some mixture of the two. However, the processes governing population dynamics may vary greatly among species. We propose a core‐transient framework for trait‐based community studies where a core group of species has a strong link to the local environment while transient species...

Conspecific negative density dependence ( CNDD ) has been recognized as a key mechanism underlying species coexistence, especially in tropical forests. Recently, some studies have reported that seedling survival is also negatively correlated with the phylogenetic relatedness between neighbors and focal individuals, termed phylogenetic negative density dependence ( PNDD ). In contrast to CNDD or PNDD , shared habitat requiremen...