Commonness and rarity determinants of woody plants in different types of tropical forests

Abstract

The aim of this work is to examine whether there exists a link between local and landscape patterns of species commonness, and if these are related to morphological traits in tropical plant communities. The Madidi region (Bolivian tropical Andes) is selected as study location. We estimated local and landscape commonness, rarity classes, height, diameter, number of stems, and habit for[2,300 species. We employed correlations to evaluate the relationship between local scale commonness and landscape scale commonness. We performed ANCOVA and multinomial logistic regressions to predict commonness and rarity variables from the morphological traits. We repeated the analyses for six different forest types, including dry forests and wet forests along a 3,477 m elevation gradient. We found a positive relationship between local and landscape commonness in all Communicated by Peter Ashton. forest types. Additionally, we found that, plant height influences the local and landscape commonness, and that the apportioning of species into rarity classes depends greatly on the species habit and, at lesser degree, on the number of stems. Our main conclusions are: (1) Approaches to commonness and rarity based on abundance only or occurrence only could summarize most of the relevant information to characterize commonness and rarity patterns: both approaches, in practice, do not supply independent information. (2) The species traits determine which species are rare and which ones are common, which indicates that commonness and rarity patterns are the result of non-neutral trait-based community assembly processes.

Oligarchic patterns in tropical forests: role of the spatial extent, environmental heterogeneity and diversity

“…Larger sub‐regions showed weaker oligarchic patterns, as predicted, a trend caused by the increase in elevational variability, but more importantly by geographical extent per se . Thus, dispersal limitation alone could cause important spatial aggregation of oligarchic species in spite of their hypothesized strong dispersal abilities (Ruokolainen & Vormisto, ; Pitman et al ., ; Davidar et al ., ; Kristiansen et al ., ; Arellano et al ., ). This is in agreement with findings of Ter Steege et al .…”

Evolutionary patterns of range size, abundance and species richness in Amazonian angiosperm trees

“…There are two large-scale databases available that provide reasonable coverage of Amazonian tree species, for wood density and seed mass ( Zanne et al, 2009 ; Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, 2016 ), but these two traits do not appear to be related to tree abundance in the Amazon ( Ter Steege et al, 2013 ; Ter Steege et al, 2015 ). At smaller spatial scales, tree height has been shown to be positively correlated with abundance ( Pitman et al, 2001 ; Arellano et al, 2015 ), but it is unclear if this pattern holds at the scale of the entire Amazon Basin.…”

Exploring patterns of commonness and rarity in lichens: a case study from Italy (Southern Europe)

“…(1996) have defined ecology as the study of commonness and rarity among and within species (Arellano et al . 2015). Both concepts are intrinsically “fuzzy” since they can be operationally expressed at different scales and along different ecological dimensions (Hanski 1982; Brown 1984; Rabinowitz et al .…”

“…Commonness and rarity of species have been studied by biologists for decades (e.g. Preston 1948;Rabinowitz 1981), so that Kelly et al (1996) have defined ecology as the study of commonness and rarity among and within species (Arellano et al 2015). Both concepts are intrinsically "fuzzy" since they can be operationally expressed at different scales and along different ecological dimensions (Hanski 1982;Brown 1984;Rabinowitz et al 1986;Pitman et al 2001;Murray et al 2002;Kristiansen et al 2009).…”