Leite, Melina de Souza and Mcmahon, Sean M. and Prado, Paulo Inacio and Davies, Stuart J. and Oliveira, Alexandre Adalardo de and De Deurwaerder, Hannes P. and Aguilar, Salomon and Anderson-Teixeira, Kristina J. and Aqilah, Nurfarah and Bourg, Norman A. and Brockelman, Warren Y. and Castano, Nicolas and Chang-Yang, Chia-Hao and Chen, Yu-Yun and Chuyong, George and Clay, Keith and Duque, Alvaro and Ediriweera, Sisira and Ewango, Corneille E. N. and Gilbert, Gregory and Gunatilleke, I. A. U. N. and Gunatilleke, C. V. S. and Howe, Robert and Huasco, Walter Huaraca and Itoh, Akira and Johnson, Daniel J. and Kenfack, David and Kral, Kamil and Leong, Yao Tze and Lutz, James A. and Makana, Jean-Remy and Malhi, Yadvinder and Mcshea, William J. and Mohamad, Mohizah and Nasardin, Musalmah and Nathalang, Anuttara and Parker, Geoffrey and Parmigiani, Renan and Perez, Rolando and Phillips, Richard P. and Samonil, Pavel and Sun, I-Fang and Tan, Sylvester and Thomas, Duncan and Thompson, Jill and Uriarte, Maria and Wolf, Amy and Zimmerman, Jess and Zuleta, Daniel and Visser, Marco D. and Huelsmann, Lisa (2024) Major axes of variation in tree demography across global forests. ECOGRAPHY, 2024 (6). ISSN 0906-7590, 1600-0587
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
The future trajectory of global forests is closely intertwined with tree demography, and a major fundamental goal in ecology is to understand the key mechanisms governing spatio-temporal patterns in tree population dynamics. While previous research has made substantial progress in identifying the mechanisms individually, their relative importance among forests remains unclear mainly due to practical limitations. One approach to overcome these limitations is to group mechanisms according to their shared effects on the variability of tree vital rates and quantify patterns therein. We developed a conceptual and statistical framework (variance partitioning of Bayesian multilevel models) that attributes the variability in tree growth, mortality, and recruitment to variation in species, space, and time, and their interactions - categories we refer to as organising principles (OPs). We applied the framework to data from 21 forest plots covering more than 2.9 million trees of approximately 6500 species. We found that differences among species, the species OP, proved a major source of variability in tree vital rates, explaining 28-33% of demographic variance alone, and 14-17% in interaction with space, totalling 40-43%. Our results support the hypothesis that the range of vital rates is similar across global forests. However, the average variability among species declined with species richness, indicating that diverse forests featured smaller interspecific differences in vital rates. Moreover, decomposing the variance in vital rates into the proposed OPs showed the importance of unexplained variability, which includes individual variation, in tree demography. A focus on how demographic variance is organized in forests can facilitate the construction of more targeted models with clearer expectations of which covariates might drive a vital rate. This study therefore highlights the most promising avenues for future research, both in terms of understanding the relative contributions of groups of mechanisms to forest demography and diversity, and for improving projections of forest ecosystems.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | FUNCTIONAL TRAITS; VITAL-RATES; SPECIES-DIVERSITY; TROPICAL FOREST; DYNAMIC FOREST; TRADE-OFFS; MODELS; ECOLOGY; GROWTH; SIZE; multilevel models; spatial and temporal variation; species differences; temperate forests; tree demography; tropical forests; variance partitioning; vital rates |
| Subjects: | 500 Science > 550 Earth sciences 500 Science > 580 Botanical sciences |
| Divisions: | Biology, Preclinical Medicine > Institut für Pflanzenwissenschaften > Group Theoretical Ecology (Prof. Dr. Florian Hartig) |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Aug 2025 06:36 |
| Last Modified: | 06 Aug 2025 06:36 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/65696 |
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