Multispecies coexistence of trees in tropical forests: Spatial signals of topographic niche differentiation increase with environmental heterogeneity

Abstract:

Neutral and niche theories give contrasting explanations for the maintenance of tropical tree species diversity. Both have some empirical support, but methods to disentangle their effects have not yet been developed.We applied a statistical measure of spatial structure to data from 14 large tropical forest plots to test a pbkp_rediction of niche theory that is incompatiblewith neutral theory: that species in heterogeneous environments should separate out in space according to their niche preferences.We chose plots across a range of topographic heterogeneity, and tested whether pairwise spatial associations among species were more variable in more heterogeneous sites. We found strong support for this pbkp_rediction, based on a strong positive relationship between variance in the spatial structure of species pairs and topographic heterogeneity across sites. We interpret this pattern as evidence of pervasive niche differentiation, which increases in importance with increasing environmental heterogeneity. © 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.

Año de publicación:

2013

Keywords:

• Cross-pair overlap distribution
• Species coexistence
• niche differentiation
• Tropical Forest
• Neutral theory
• Spatial pattern

Fuente:

scopus

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