Generalized additive mixed models for disentangling long-term trends, local anomalies, and seasonality in fruit tree phenology.

ABSTRACT: Quantifying temporal patterns of ephemeral plant structures such as leaves, flowers, and fruits gives insight into both plant and animal ecology. Different scales of temporal changes in fruits, for example within- versus across-year variability, are driven by different processes, but are not always easy to disentangle. We apply generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) to study a long-term fruit presence-absence data set of individual trees collected from a high-altitude Afromontane tropical rain forest site within Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP), Uganda. Our primary aim was to highlight and evaluate GAMM methodology, and quantify both intra- and interannual changes in fruit production. First, we conduct several simulation experiments to study the practical utility of model select

SUBMITTER: Polansky L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3790557 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature