Made available in DSpace on 2021-06-25T10:27:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2021-01-01; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); The forests of Amazonia are among the most biodiverse plant communities on Earth. Given the immediate threats posed by climate and land-use change, an improved understanding of how this extraordinary biodiversity is spatially organized...
Made available in DSpace on 2020-12-12T01:28:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2020-12-01; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, but the estimated species richness is very much debated. Here, we apply an ensemble of parametric estimators and a novel technique that includes conspecific spatial aggregation to an exten...
Made available in DSpace on 2020-12-12T01:40:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2019-12-01; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such “monodominant” forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sam...
Successional gradients are ubiquitous in nature, yet few studies have systematically examined the evolutionary origins of taxa that specialize at different successional stages. Here we quantify successional habitat specialization in Neotropical forest trees and evaluate its evolutionary lability along a precipitation gradient. Theoretically, successional habitat specialization should be more evolutionarily cons...
Competition among trees is an important driver of community structure and dynamics in tropical forests. Neighboring trees may impact an individual tree’s growth rate and probability of mortality, but large-scale geographic and environmental variation in these competitive effects has yet to be evaluated across the tropical forest biome. We quantified effects of competition on tree-level basal area growth and mor...
Understanding the relationships between plant traits and ecosystem properties at large spatial scales is important for predicting how compositional change will affect carbon cycling in tropical forests. In this study, we examine the relationships between species wood density, maximum height and above-ground, coarse wood production of trees ≥10 cm diameter (CWP) for 60 Amazonian forest plots. Average species max...
Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, but the estimated species richness is very much debated. Here, we apply an ensemble of parametric estimators and a novel technique that includes conspecific spatial aggregation to an extended database of forest plots with up-to-date taxonomy. We show that the species abundance distribution of Amazonia is best approximated by a logseries with aggregated individuals,...
Lineages tend to retain ecological characteristics of their ancestors through time. However, for some traits, selection during evolutionary history may have also played a role in determining trait values. To address the relative importance of these processes requires large-scale quantification of traits and evolutionary relationships among species. The Amazonian tree flora comprises a high diversity of angiospe...
Forest structure and dynamics vary across the Amazon Basin in an east-west gradient coincident with variations in soil fertility and geology. This has resulted in the hypothesis that soil fertility may play an important role in explaining Basin-wide variations in forest biomass, growth and stem turnover rates. Soil samples were collected in a total of 59 different forest plots across the Amazon Basin and analys...
Through interpretations of remote-sensing data and/or theoretical propositions, the idea that forest and savanna represent "alternative stable states" is gaining increasing acceptance. Filling an observational gap, we present detailed stratified floristic and structural analyses for forest and savanna stands located mostly within zones of transition (where both vegetation types occur in close proximity) in Afri...