Functional trait and phylogenetic tests of community assembly across spatial scales in an Amazonian forest

By Nathan J B Kraft, David D. Ackerly. 2010

608 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite a long history of the study of tropical forests, uncertainty about the importance of different ecological processes in shaping tropical tree species distributions persists. Trait- and phylogenetic-based tests of community assembly provide a powerful way to detect community assembly processes but have seldom been applied to the same community. Both methods are well suited to testing how the relative importance of different ecological processes changes with spatial scale. Here we apply both methods to the Yasuni Forest Dynamics Plot, a 25-ha Amazonian forest with >1100 tree species. We found evidence for habitat filtering from both trait and phylogenetic methods from small (25 m2) to intermediate (10 000 m2) spatial scales. Trait-based methods detected even spacing of strategies, a pattern consistent with niche partitioning or enemy-mediated density dependence, at smaller spatial scales (25–400 m2). Simulation modeling of community assembly processes suggests that low statistical power to detect eve...

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2be9901245c3ac842eb71c93b44e34bc2da8d890

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Citations in the corpus

The relationship of tropical bird communities to tree species composition and vegetation structure along an Andean elevational gradient (2013, methodology): “Significance was determined by dividing the number of null values greater than the observed value by the number of permutations plus one (Kraft & Ackerly, 2010).”
Dos and don'ts when inferring assembly rules from diversity patterns (2020, background): “…scale dependence of assembly processes was recognized early on, with most studies focusing on the effects of spatial scales (Carboni et al., 2013; Kraft & Ackerly, 2010), fewer on the level of description of organisms (e.g., functional group versus species versus individual level) or different…”
Functional and phylogenetic assembly in a Chinese tropical tree community across size classes, spatial scales and habitats (2014, background): “Thus, deterministic models predict that community structure should be non-random with respect to functional traits and phylogeny (e.g. Swenson & Enquist 2009; Kraft & Ackerly 2010; Swenson et al. 2012).”
Using trait and phylogenetic diversity to evaluate the generality of the stress‐dominance hypothesis in eastern North American tree communities (2014, background): “Similar phylogenies have been useful in evaluating ecological hypotheses about the phylogenetic relationships among species in communities (Cavender-Bares et al. 2006, Kembel and Hubbell 2006, Kraft and Ackerly 2010).”
Change in community phylogenetic structure during tropical forest succession: evidence from New Guinea (2012, background): “…reproduction, and dispersal (Kembel 2009) in the context of forest succession could further refi ne mechanistic hypotheses on species coexistence (Kraft and Ackerly 2010, Uriarte et al. 2010) and growth-mortality trade-off s accounting for life history diff erences among primary and secondary…”
Using functional traits and phylogenetic trees to examine the assembly of tropical tree communities (2012, background): “…has confirmed the importance of environmental filtering in community assembly (Pennington, Lavin & Oliveira-Filho 2009; Swenson & Enquist 2009; Kraft & Ackerly 2010; Uriarte et al. 2010; Hardy et al. 2012), as well as the role of plant–pathogen interactions in promoting species coexistence…”
Do traits and phylogeny support congruent community diversity patterns and assembly inferences? (2019, background): “While measures of phylogenetic (PD) and functional diversity (FD) have provided important insights into community assembly (Helmus et al., 2010; Kraft & Ackerly, 2010), each approach comes with important assumptions and limitations that impact their usefulness and interpretability (Cadotte, Albert,…”
Phylogenetic conservatism in plant phenology (2013, background): “…attributes such as life form, habit, dispersal mode and pollination (e.g. Olsson & Agren 2002; Bolmgren & Cowan 2008; Jentsch et al. 2009; Davis et al. 2010; Sun & Frelich 2011), which may in turn be phylogenetically conserved (Chazdon et al. 2003; Swenson & Enquist 2007; Kraft & Ackerly 2010).”
Functional traits of individual trees reveal ecological constraints on community assembly in tropical rain forests (2011, methodology): “And even this weak evidence of niche diff erentiation may overstate its role, since our metric of trait evenness, the standard deviation of nearest neighbor distances in trait space can confound the eff ects of niche diff erentiation with those of habitat fi ltering (Kraft and Ackerly 2010).”
Evidence for scale‐ and disturbance‐dependent trait assembly patterns in dry semi‐natural grasslands (2013, background): “…divergence patterns at different spatial scales and under different disturbance regimes may therefore help to provide a more mechanistic interpretation of community assembly patterns and to disentangle biotic and abiotic effects (Cornwell & Ackerly 2009; Kraft & Ackerly 2010; Willis et al. 2010).”
Predicting tropical insect herbivore abundance from host plant traits and phylogeny (2012, background): “Phylogenetic signal in nutrient availability has been observed in another tropical forest (Kraft and Ackerly 2010, Kraft et al. 2010), and in our study, PGLS demonstrated that consideration of host plant related- ness did increase the power of leaf nitrogen to predict caterpillar abundance on a…”