Effects of Drought, Pest Pressure and Light Availability on Seedling Establishment and Growth: Their Role for Distribution of Tree Species across a Tropical Rainfall Gradient.

ABSTRACT: Tree species distributions associated with rainfall are among the most prominent patterns in tropical forests. Understanding the mechanisms shaping these patterns is important to project impacts of global climate change on tree distributions and diversity in the tropics. Beside direct effects of water availability, additional factors co-varying with rainfall have been hypothesized to play an important role, including pest pressure and light availability. While low water availability is expected to exclude drought-intolerant wet forest species from drier forests (physiological tolerance hypothesis), high pest pressure or low light availability are hypothesized to exclude dry forest species from wetter forests (pest pressure gradient and light availability hypothesis, respectively). To test

SUBMITTER: Gaviria J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4664389 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature