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Competition influences tree growth, but not mortality, across environmental gradients in Amazonia and tropical Africa
- Source :
- Ecology, Ecology 101 (2020) 7, Rozendaal, D M A, Phillips, O L, Lewis, S L, Affum-Baffoe, K, Alvarez-Davila, E, Andrade, A, Aragão, L E O C, Araujo-Murakami, A, Baker, T R, Bánki, O, Brienen, R J W, Camargo, J L C, Comiskey, J A, Djuikouo Kamdem, M N, Fauset, S, Feldpausch, T R, Killeen, T J, Laurance, W F, Laurance, S G W, Lovejoy, T, Malhi, Y, Marimon, B S, Marimon Junior, B H, Marshall, A R, Neill, D A, Núñez Vargas, P, Pitman, N C A, Poorter, L, Reitsma, J, Silveira, M, Sonké, B, Sunderland, T, Taedoumg, H, ter Steege, H, Terborgh, J W, Umetsu, R K, van der Heijden, G M F, Vilanova, E, Vos, V, White, L J T, Willcock, S, Zemagho, L & Vanderwel, M C 2020, ' Competition influences tree growth, but not mortality, across environmental gradients in Amazonia and tropical Africa ', Ecology, vol. 101, no. 7, e03052, pp. 1-11 . https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3052, Repositório Institucional do INPA, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), instacron:INPA, Ecology, 101(7), Ecology, 101(7):e03052, 1-11. Ecological Society of America
- Publication Year :
- 2020
-
Abstract
- 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 mortality for trees ≥10-cm diameter across 151 ~1-ha plots in mature tropical forests in Amazonia and tropical Africa by developing nonlinear models that accounted for wood density, tree size, and neighborhood crowding. Using these models, we assessed how water availability (i.e., climatic water deficit) and soil fertility influenced the predicted plot-level strength of competition (i.e., the extent to which growth is reduced, or mortality is increased, by competition across all individual trees). On both continents, tree basal area growth decreased with wood density and increased with tree size. Growth decreased with neighborhood crowding, which suggests that competition is important. Tree mortality decreased with wood density and generally increased with tree size, but was apparently unaffected by neighborhood crowding. Across plots, variation in the plot-level strength of competition was most strongly related to plot basal area (i.e., the sum of the basal area of all trees in a plot), with greater reductions in growth occurring in forests with high basal area, but in Amazonia, the strength of competition also varied with plot-level wood density. In Amazonia, the strength of competition increased with water availability because of the greater basal area of wetter forests, but was only weakly related to soil fertility. In Africa, competition was weakly related to soil fertility and invariant across the shorter water availability gradient. Overall, our results suggest that competition influences the structure and dynamics of tropical forests primarily through effects on individual tree growth rather than mortality and that the strength of competition largely depends on environment-mediated variation in basal area. © 2020 The Authors. Ecology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Ecological Society of America
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
forest dynamics
tropical forest
media_common.quotation_subject
Biome
tree growth
Biology
Forests
010603 evolutionary biology
01 natural sciences
Competition (biology)
Article
Basal area
Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing
Bosecologie en Bosbeheer
Laboratorium voor Geo-informatiekunde en Remote Sensing
Growth rate
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Ecosystem
media_common
Tropical Climate
Forest dynamics
Amazon rainforest
Ecology
010604 marine biology & hydrobiology
soil fertility
Community structure
Articles
trait-based models
wood density
PE&RC
Wood
mortality
Forest Ecology and Forest Management
trait‐based models
climatic water deficit
Africa
neighborhood effects
Soil fertility
Crop and Weed Ecology
competition
Brazil
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00129658
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Ecology, Ecology 101 (2020) 7, Rozendaal, D M A, Phillips, O L, Lewis, S L, Affum-Baffoe, K, Alvarez-Davila, E, Andrade, A, Aragão, L E O C, Araujo-Murakami, A, Baker, T R, Bánki, O, Brienen, R J W, Camargo, J L C, Comiskey, J A, Djuikouo Kamdem, M N, Fauset, S, Feldpausch, T R, Killeen, T J, Laurance, W F, Laurance, S G W, Lovejoy, T, Malhi, Y, Marimon, B S, Marimon Junior, B H, Marshall, A R, Neill, D A, Núñez Vargas, P, Pitman, N C A, Poorter, L, Reitsma, J, Silveira, M, Sonké, B, Sunderland, T, Taedoumg, H, ter Steege, H, Terborgh, J W, Umetsu, R K, van der Heijden, G M F, Vilanova, E, Vos, V, White, L J T, Willcock, S, Zemagho, L & Vanderwel, M C 2020, ' Competition influences tree growth, but not mortality, across environmental gradients in Amazonia and tropical Africa ', Ecology, vol. 101, no. 7, e03052, pp. 1-11 . https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3052, Repositório Institucional do INPA, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), instacron:INPA, Ecology, 101(7), Ecology, 101(7):e03052, 1-11. Ecological Society of America
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....bc3465fbb94c035ec03d59b3d0415419