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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...
Aim To determine the relationships between the functional trait composition of forest communities and environmental gradients across scales and biomes and the role of species relative abundances in these relationships. Location Global. Time period Recent. Major taxa studied Trees. Methods We integrated species abundance records from worldwide forest inventories and associated functional traits (wood density, specific leaf area...
Aim Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales. Availability of such data has increased exponentially recently with the proliferation of biodiversity databases. However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards have hampered integration among these databases. To stimulate the next stage of data integration, here we present a synthes...
sPlotOpen – An environmentally balanced, open‐access, global dataset of vegetation plotsNARA Subscribed
Motivation Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co‐occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provided by existing global plant datasets. Although many vegetation plots...
Global patterns and drivers of alpine plant species richnessNARA Subscribed
Aim Alpine ecosystems differ in area, macroenvironment and biogeographical history across the Earth, but the relationship between these factors and plant species richness is still unexplored. Here, we assess the global patterns of plant species richness in alpine ecosystems and their association with environmental, geographical and historical factors at regional and community scales. Location Global. Time period Data collected...
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...
Spatial patterns and climate relationships of major plant traits in the New World differ between woody and herbaceous speciesNARA Subscribed
Aim Despite several recent efforts to map plant traits and to identify their climatic drivers, there are still major gaps. Global trait patterns for major functional groups, in particular, the differences between woody and herbaceous plants, have yet to be identified. Here, we take advantage of big data efforts to compile plant species occurrence and trait data to analyse the spatial patterns of assemblage means and variances...
Quantifying invasion resistance: the use of recruitment functions to control for propagule pressureNARA Subscribed
Invasive species distributions tend to be biased towards some habitats compared to others due to the combined effects of habitat‐specific resistance to invasion and non‐uniform propagule pressure. These two factors may also interact, with habitat resistance varying as a function of propagule supply rate. Recruitment experiments, in which the number of individuals recruiting into a population is measured under different propagu...
Habitat area and climate stability determine geographical variation in plant species range sizesNARA Subscribed
Despite being a fundamental aspect of biodiversity, little is known about what controls species range sizes. This is especially the case for hyperdiverse organisms such as plants. We use the largest botanical data set assembled to date to quantify geographical variation in range size for ~ 85 000 plant species across the New World. We assess prominent hypothesised range‐size controls, finding that plant range sizes are codeter...
Dispersal limitation, speciation, environmental filtering and niche differentiation influence forest tree communities in West PolynesiaNARA Subscribed
Aim Regional patterns of forest composition in West Polynesia were analysed to determine the relative importance of dispersal limitation, speciation, environmental filtering and biotic interactions. Location West Polynesia (Fiji, Tonga, Samoa). Methods We applied clustering and indicator species analysis to presence/absence data for 397 tree taxa in 338 forest plots to detect groups of plots sharing similar species composition...
Globally, ecosystems are under increasing anthropogenic pressure; thus, many are at risk of elimination. This situation has led the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to propose a quantitative approach to ecosystem‐risk assessment. However, there is a need for their proposed criteria to be evaluated through practical examples spanning a diverse range of ecosystems and scales. We applied the IUCN's ecosystem...
Coastal turfs are communities of tightly interlaced, ground‐smothering, short‐statured herbs, grasses and sedges occupying shoreline rock landforms exposed to persistent salt‐laden onshore winds. They are recorded from eight mainland New Zealand regions along the west and south coasts of North and South Islands. They display regional compositional distinctiveness best explained by geographic location, landform shape and substr...
Aboveground and Belowground Effects of Single‐tree Removals in New Zealand Rain ForestNARA Subscribed
There has been considerable recent interest in how human‐induced species loss affects community and ecosystem properties. These effects are particularly apparent when a commercially valuable species is harvested from an ecosystem, such as occurs through single‐tree harvesting or selective logging of desired timber species in natural forests. In New Zealand mixed‐species rain forests, single‐tree harvesting of the emergent gymn...
Growth–size scaling relationships of woody plant species differ from predictions of the Metabolic Ecology ModelNARA Subscribed
The Metabolic Ecology Model predicts that tree diameter ( D ) growth ( dD/dt ) scales with D 1/3 . Using data on diameter growth and height–diameter relationships for 56 and 40 woody species, respectively, from forests throughout New Zealand, we tested one prediction and two assumptions of this model: (i) the exponent of the growth–diameter scaling relationship equals 1/3 and is invariant among species and growth forms, (ii) s...
Determinants of regional and local patterns in the floras of braided riverbeds in New ZealandNARA Subscribed
Aim To determine the composition and biogeographical origins of the native and naturalized flora of braided shingle riverbeds in New Zealand and whether the proportion of naturalized species is greater than in similar habitats elsewhere in the world. To test whether regional species pools, landscape matrix configuration, and local riverbed environment are all equally important in determining community structure in these system...
The potential for long‐term persistence of forest fragments on Tongatapu, a large island in western PolynesiaNARA Subscribed
Aim We describe compositional variation among forest fragments on Tongatapu in terms of successional status and site conditions. We then examine two factors that directly influence the potential for long‐term persistence of these fragments – tree regeneration and alien invasion. Location Tongatapu is the largest (261 km 2 ), most densely inhabited (population 67,000) island in the Kingdom of Tonga, western Polynesia. Inhabited...
Strategies to estimate national forest carbon stocks from inventory data: the 1990 New Zealand baselineNARA Subscribed
Summary An estimate of live tree carbon stored in New Zealand forests at 1990 was made to partially satisfy New Zealand's international obligations under the Framework Convention for Climate Change. A national database was compiled of 4956 forest inventory plots measured as recently as possible to 1990. Plot biomass estimates were obtained by applying species allometric relationships derived from harvested stands. Forest areas...
Comparison of Southern Appalachian high‐elevation outcrop plant communities with their Northern Appalachian counterpartsNARA Subscribed
Southern Appalachian high‐elevation outcrops harbour six regionally rare Northern Appalachian taxa usually considered relicts of a Pleistocene alpine flora. For five of the six taxa, minimum elevation in the south was 367–1113 m higher than in the north. While habitats compared between the two regions share only 9% of their total flora, individual plots had up to 70% of their species occurring in the opposite region. The north...
Mountain beech forest succession after a fire at Mount Thomas Forest, Canterbury, New ZealandNARA Subscribed
The impact of fire on the resilience of tree and shrub species populations, and the relationships between distance from the unburnt forest margin and composition, were examined from data collected 1, 2, 4, 6, 10, and 15 years after a fire at Mount Thomas Forest in 1980. Although some scorched mountain beech trees flushed, virtually all trees died within five years. The few surviving mountain beech seedlings mostly occurred wit...
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