Trees represent community composition of other plant life-forms, but not their diversity, abundance or responses to fragmentation.

ABSTRACT: Our understanding of the patterns of plant diversity in tropical forests and their responses to fragmentation are mostly based on tree surveys. But are these patterns and responses representative of other plant life-forms? We sampled trees, lianas, herbs, and ferns in a fragmented tropical forest landscape in South-west China. We compared community types generated by clustering presence-absence data for the non-tree life-forms with those generated for trees. We tested how well measures of tree diversity, density and composition, predicted cognate indices in other life-forms. We compared fragmentation responses, with respect to the three measures, of all four life-forms. Presence-absence data from all life-forms generated three community clusters, with only small differences between classif

SUBMITTER: Pasion BO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6063943 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature