How individual species structure diversity in tropical forests.

ABSTRACT: A persistent challenge in ecology is to explain the high diversity of tree species in tropical forests. Although the role of species characteristics in maintaining tree diversity in tropical forests has been the subject of theory and debate for decades, spatial patterns in local diversity have not been analyzed from the viewpoint of individual species. To measure scale-dependent local diversity structures around individual species, we propose individual species-area relationships (ISAR), a spatial statistic that marries common species-area relationships with Ripley's K to measure the expected alpha diversity in circular neighborhoods with variable radius around an arbitrary individual of a target species. We use ISAR to investigate if and at which spatial scales individual species increase

SUBMITTER: Wiegand T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2141902 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature