Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Ecography
Author ORCID Identifier
Melina de Souza Leite https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0505-0667
Sean M. McMahon https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8302-6908
Paulo Inácio Prado https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7174-5005
Hannes P. De Deurwaerder https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9287-2062
Kristina J. Anderson-Teixeira https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8461-9713
Norman A. Bourg https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7443-1992
Warren Y. Brockelman https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8649-1984
Nicolas Castaño https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2892-1074
Chia-Hao Chang-Yang https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3635-4946
Yu-Yun Chen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8760-8649
George Chuyong https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0235-211X
I. A. U. N. Gunatilleke https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3271-2945
Walter Huaraca Huasco https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5300-4986
Akira Itoh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2493-1681
Daniel J. Johnson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8585-2143
David Kenfack https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8208-3388
Kamil Král https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3848-2119
Yao Tze Leong https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5274-1623
James A. Lutz https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2560-0710
Jean-Remy Makana https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6006-2938
Yadvinder Malhi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3503-4783
William J. McShea https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8102-0200
Musalmah Nasardin https://orcid.org/0009-0000-2512-2993
Anuttara Nathalang https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2780-0289
Renan Parmigiani https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2055-2393
Richard P. Phillips https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1345-4138
Pavel Šamonil https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7722-8797
I-Fang Sun https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9749-8324
Jill Thompson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4370-2593
Daniel Zuleta https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9832-6188
Marco D. Visser https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1200-0852
Lisa Hülsmann https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4252-2715
Volume
2024
Issue
6
Publisher
Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
Publication Date
5-6-2024
Journal Article Version
Version of Record
First Page
1
Last Page
14
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Abstract
The future trajectory of global forests is closely intertwined with tree demography, and a major fundamental goal in ecology is to understand the key mechanisms governing spatio-temporal patterns in tree population dynamics. While previous research has made substantial progress in identifying the mechanisms individually, their relative importance among forests remains unclear mainly due to practical limitations. One approach to overcome these limitations is to group mechanisms according to their shared effects on the variability of tree vital rates and quantify patterns therein. We developed a conceptual and statistical framework (variance partitioning of Bayesian multilevel models) that attributes the variability in tree growth, mortality, and recruitment to variation in species, space, and time, and their interactions – categories we refer to as organising principles (OPs). We applied the framework to data from 21 forest plots covering more than 2.9 million trees of approximately 6500 species. We found that differences among species, the species OP, proved a major source of variability in tree vital rates, explaining 28–33% of demographic variance alone, and 14–17% in interaction with space, totalling 40–43%. Our results support the hypothesis that the range of vital rates is similar across global forests. However, the average variability among species declined with species richness, indicating that diverse forests featured smaller interspecific differences in vital rates. Moreover, decomposing the variance in vital rates into the proposed OPs showed the importance of unexplained variability, which includes individual variation, in tree demography. A focus on how demographic variance is organized in forests can facilitate the construction of more targeted models with clearer expectations of which covariates might drive a vital rate. This study therefore highlights the most promising avenues for future research, both in terms of understanding the relative contributions of groups of mechanisms to forest demography and diversity, and for improving projections of forest ecosystems.
Recommended Citation
Leite, M.d.S., McMahon, S.M., Prado, P.I., Davies, S.J., Oliveira, A.A.d., De Deurwaerder, H.P., Aguilar, S., Anderson-Teixeira, K.J., Aqilah, N., Bourg, N.A., Brockelman, W.Y., Castaño, N., Chang-Yang, C.-H., Chen, Y.-Y., Chuyong, G., Clay, K., Duque, Á., Ediriweera, S., Ewango, C.E.N., Gilbert, G., Gunatilleke, I.A.U.N., Gunatilleke, C.V.S., Howe, R., Huasco, W.H., Itoh, A., Johnson, D.J., Kenfack, D., Král, K., Leong, Y.T., Lutz, J.A., Makana, J.-R., Malhi, Y., McShea, W.J., Mohamad, M., Nasardin, M., Nathalang, A., Parker, G., Parmigiani, R., Pérez, R., Phillips, R.P., Šamonil, P., Sun, I.-F., Tan, S., Thomas, D., Thompson, J., Uriarte, M., Wolf, A., Zimmerman, J., Zuleta, D., Visser, M.D. and Hülsmann, L. (2024), Major axes of variation in tree demography across global forests. Ecography, 2024: e07187. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.07187
