Functional trait and phylogenetic tests of community assembly across spatial scales in an Amazonian forest

Nathan J B Kraft,D. Ackerly

Published 2010 in Ecological Monographs

ABSTRACT

Despite a long history of the study of tropical forests, uncertainty about the importance of different ecological processes in shaping tropical tree species distributions persists. Trait- and phylogenetic-based tests of community assembly provide a powerful way to detect community assembly processes but have seldom been applied to the same community. Both methods are well suited to testing how the relative importance of different ecological processes changes with spatial scale. Here we apply both methods to the Yasuni Forest Dynamics Plot, a 25-ha Amazonian forest with >1100 tree species. We found evidence for habitat filtering from both trait and phylogenetic methods from small (25 m2) to intermediate (10 000 m2) spatial scales. Trait-based methods detected even spacing of strategies, a pattern consistent with niche partitioning or enemy-mediated density dependence, at smaller spatial scales (25–400 m2). Simulation modeling of community assembly processes suggests that low statistical power to detect eve...

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2010

  • Venue

    Ecological Monographs

  • Publication date

    2010-08-01

  • Fields of study

    Biology, Geography, Environmental Science

  • Identifiers
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-94 of 94 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-100 of 604 citing papers · Page 1 of 7