Insights into regional patterns of Amazonian forest structure, diversity, and dominance from three large terra-firme forest dynamics plots

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• 作者：Alvaro Duque ; Helene C. Muller-Landau ; Renato Valencia…
• 关键词：Aboveground biomass ; Abundance ; Forest conservation ; Fisher’s alpha ; Rarity ; Species richness
• 刊名：Biodiversity and Conservation
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：March 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：26
• 期：3
• 页码：669-686
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Biomedical and Life Sciences
• 刊物主题：Biodiversity; Ecology; Conservation Biology/Ecology; Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts;
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1572-9710
• 卷排序：26

文摘

We analyze forest structure, diversity, and dominance in three large-scale Amazonian forest dynamics plots located in Northwestern (Yasuni and Amacayacu) and central (Manaus) Amazonia, to evaluate their consistency with prevailing wisdom regarding geographic variation and the shape of species abundance distributions, and to assess the robustness of among-site patterns to plot area, minimum tree size, and treatment of morphospecies. We utilized data for 441,088 trees (DBH ≥1 cm) in three 25-ha forest dynamics plots. Manaus had significantly higher biomass and mean wood density than Yasuni and Amacayacu. At the 1-ha scale, species richness averaged 649 for trees ≥1 cm DBH, and was lower in Amacayacu than in Manaus or Yasuni; however, at the 25-ha scale the rankings shifted, with Yasuni < Amacayacu < Manaus. Within each site, Fisher’s alpha initially increased with plot area to 1–10 ha, and then showed divergent patterns at larger areas depending on the site and minimum size. Abundance distributions were better fit by lognormal than by logseries distributions. Results were robust to the treatment of morphospecies. Overall, regional patterns in Amazonian tree species diversity vary with the spatial scale of analysis and the minimum tree size. The minimum area to capture local diversity is 2 ha for trees ≥1 cm DBH, or 10 ha for trees ≥10 cm DBH. The underlying species abundance distribution for Amazonian tree communities is lognormal, consistent with the idea that the rarest species have not yet been sampled. Enhanced sampling intensity is needed to fill the still large voids we have in plant diversity in Amazon forests.