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Item type:Publication, Linking patterns and processes of tree community assembly across spatial scales in tropical montane forests(Ecological Society of America, 2020-07-01)Many studies have tried to assess the role of both deterministic and stochastic processes in community assembly, yet a lack of consensus exists on which processes are more prevalent and at which spatial scales they operate. To shed light on this issue, we tested two nonmutually exclusive, scale-dependent hypotheses: (1) that competitive exclusion dominates at small spatial scales; and (2) that environmental filtering does so at larger ones. To accomplish this, we studied the functional patterns of tropical montane forest communities along two altitudinal gradients, in Ecuador and Peru, using floristic and functional data from 60 plots of 0.1 ha. We found no evidence of either functional overdispersion or clustering at small spatial scales, but we did find functional clustering at larger ones. The observed pattern of clustering, consistent with an environmental filtering process, was more evident when maximizing the environmental differences among any pair of plots. To strengthen the link between the observed community functional pattern and the underlying process of environmental filtering, we explored differences in the climatic preferences of the most abundant species found at lower and higher elevations and examined whether their abundances shifted along the elevation gradient. We found (1) that greater community functional differences (observed between lower and upper tropical montane forest assemblies) were mostly the result of strong climatic preferences, maintained across the Neotropics; and (2) that the abundances of such species shifted along the elevational gradient. Our findings support the conclusion that, at large spatial scales, environmental filtering is the overriding mechanism for community assembly, because the pattern of functional clustering was linked to species’ similarities in their climatic preferences, which ultimately resulted in shifts in species abundances along the gradient. However, there was no evidence of competitive exclusion at more homogeneous, smaller spatial scales, where plant species effectively compete for resources. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests(Nature Research, 2025)Tropical forest canopies are the biosphere’s most concentrated atmospheric interface for carbon, water and energy¹′². However, in most Earth System Models, the diverse and heterogeneous tropical forest biome is represented as a largely uniform ecosystem with either a singular or a small number of fixed canopy ecophysiological properties³. This situation arises, in part, from a lack of understanding about how and why the functional properties of tropical forest canopies vary geographically⁴. Here, by combining field-collected data from more than 1,800 vegetation plots and tree traits with satellite remote-sensing, terrain, climate and soil data, we predict variation across 13 morphological, structural and chemical functional traits of trees, and use this to compute and map the functional diversity of tropical forests. Our findings reveal that the tropical Americas, Africa and Asia tend to occupy different portions of the total functional trait space available across tropical forests. Tropical American forests are predicted to have 40% greater functional richness than tropical African and Asian forests. Meanwhile, African forests have the highest functional divergence—32% and 7% higher than that of tropical American and Asian forests, respectively. An uncertainty analysis highlights priority regions for further data collection, which would refine and improve these maps. Our predictions represent a ground-based and remotely enabled global analysis of how and why the functional traits of tropical forest canopies vary across space.1