In Amazonia, wetlands constitute about 30% of its entire basin, of which ancient fluvial terraces located in vast interfluvial regions cover a large portion. Although the increased number of permanent plots in the recent years has contributed to improved understanding of regional variation in forest dynamics across the Amazon Basin, the functioning of large lowland interfluvial wetlands remain poorly understood...
A negative relationship between stand biomass and the density of stems is expected to develop during the self-thinning process in resource-limited forests; this leads to a large proportion of the total biomass occurring in large trees. Nevertheless, frequent disturbance regimes can reduce self-thinning and the accumulation of large trees. We investigated size–density relationships and the contribution of large ...
While Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, the abundance of trees is skewed strongly towards relatively few â € hyperdominantâ €™ species. In addition to their diversity, Amazonian trees are a key component of the global carbon cycle, assimilating and storing more carbon than any other ecosystem on Earth. Here we ask, using a unique data set of 530 forest plots, if the functions of storing and produci...
Estimates of extinction risk for Amazonian plant and animal species are rare and not often incorporated into land-use policy and conservation planning. We overlay spatial distribution models with historical and projected deforestation to show that at least 36% and up to 57% of all Amazonian tree species are likely to qualify as globally threatened under International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red ...
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in ecology and conservation. Presence-only SDMs such as MaxEnt frequently use natural history collections (NHCs) as occurrence data, given their huge numbers and accessibility. NHCs are often spatially biased which may generate inaccuracies in SDMs. Here, we test how the distribution of NHCs and MaxEnt predictions relates to a spatial abundance model, based on ...