Data-driven competitive facilitative tree interactions and their implications on nature-based solutions

Abstract

Spatio-temporal data are more ubiquitous and richer than even before and the availability of such data poses great challenges in data analytics. Ecological facilitation, the positive effect of density of individuals on the individual's survival across a stress gradient, is a complex phenomenon. A large number of tree individuals coupled with soil moisture, temperature, and water stress data across a long temporal period were followed. Data-driven analysis in the absence of hypothesis was performed. Information theoretic analysis of multiple statistical models was employed in order to quantify the best data-driven index of vegetation density and spatial scale of interactions. Sequentially, tree survival was quantified as a function of the size of the individual, vegetation density, and time at the optimal spatial interaction scale. Land surface temperature and soil moisture were also statistically explained by tree size, density, and time. Results indicated that in space both facilitation and competition co-exist in the same ecosystem and the sign and magnitude of this depend on the spatial scale. Overall, within the optimal data-driven spatial scale, tree survival was best explained by the interaction between density and year, sifting overall from facilitation to competition through time. However, small sized trees were always facilitated by increased densities, while large sized trees had either negative or no density effects. Tree size was more important predictor than density in survival and this has implications for nature-based solutions: maintaining large tree individuals or planting species that can become large-sized can safeguard against tree-less areas by promoting survival at long time periods through harsh environmental conditions. Large trees had also a significant effect in moderating land surface temperature and this effect was higher than the one of vegetation density on temperature.

Species associated with Curitiba prismatica (D. Legrand) Salywon & Landrum in a Faxinal system

“…Notably, C. prismatica rarely reached diameter greater than 30 cm, even with the sprouting of its stem, indicating that climax species, such as O. porosa and I. paraguariensis, interact very little, probably because of the intense uncontrolled exploitation of these species in the past. In this sense, both facilitation and competition can coexist in the community, the occurrence and magnitude of which depend on the spatial scale, where small trees are always facilitated by increasing density, while larger trees have no density effect (SIMINSKI et al, 2011;MOUSTAKAS et al, 2019).…”

Online voting behaviour, public content preferences, and content complexity of movies and digital entertainment since the late 19th century

“…Linear mixed effects models tted with maximum likelihood estimation to allow for comparisons between models with different xed effects (Moustakas, Daliakopoulos, & Benton, 2019;Pinheiro & Bates, 2000) were used to investigate the relationship between the rating of the movies (dependent variable) and the in uence of content in the rating as independent variables. Content variables included: diversity, documentary, type, action, adventure, biography, comedy, crime, drama, family, fantasy, lm noir, game show, history, horror, music, musical, mystery, news, reality TV, romance, sci.…”

Ranking the explanatory power of factors associated with worldwide new Covid-19 cases

“…Doing so the fitted LMEs accounted for both temporal and spatial autocorrelation in the time replicated data deriving from different geographic locations [21,22]. LMEs were fitted with Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation to allow comparisons between models with different fixed effects and selecting the LME that exhibited the lowest Akaike (AIC) value [27,28].…”