Interactions between all pairs of neighboring trees in 16 forests worldwide reveal details of unique ecological processes in each forest, and provide windows into their evolutionary histories.

ABSTRACT: When Darwin visited the Galapagos archipelago, he observed that, in spite of the islands' physical similarity, members of species that had dispersed to them recently were beginning to diverge from each other. He postulated that these divergences must have resulted primarily from interactions with sets of other species that had also diverged across these otherwise similar islands. By extrapolation, if Darwin is correct, such complex interactions must be driving species divergences across all ecosystems. However, many current general ecological theories that predict observed distributions of species in ecosystems do not take the details of between-species interactions into account. Here we quantify, in sixteen forest diversity plots (FDPs) worldwide, highly significant negative density-depen

SUBMITTER: Wills C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8084225 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature