Title
Environmental drivers of tree community turnover in western Amazonian forests
Date Issued
01 November 2016
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Baldeck C.A.
Jaramillo N.
Asner G.P.
Instituto Carnegie para la ciencia
Instituto Carnegie para la ciencia
Publisher(s)
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Abstract
A more comprehensive understanding of the factors governing tropical tree community turnover at different spatial scales is needed to support land-management and biodiversity conservation. We used new forest inventory data from 263 permanent plots in the Carnegie Biodiversity-Biomass Forest Plot Network spanning the eastern Andes to the western Amazonian lowlands of Peru to examine environmental factors driving genus-level canopy tree compositional variation at regional and landscape scales. Across the full plot network, constrained ordination analysis indicated that all environmental variables together explained 23.8% of the variation in community composition, while soil, topographic, and climatic variables each explained 15.2, 10.9, and 17.0%, respectively. A satellite-derived metric of cloudiness was the single strongest predictor of community turnover, and constrained ordination revealed a primary gradient of environmentally-driven community turnover spanning from cloudy, high elevation sites to warm, wet, lowland sites. For three focal landscapes within the region, local environmental variation explained 13.4–30.8% of compositional variation. Community turnover at the landscape scale was strongly driven by topo-edaphic factors in the two lowland landscapes examined and strongly driven by potential insolation and topography in the montane landscape. At the regional scale, we found that the portion of compositional variation that was uniquely explained by spatial variation was relatively small (2.7%), and was effectively zero within the three focal landscapes. Overall, our results show strong canopy tree compositional turnover in response to environmental gradients at both regional and landscape scales, though the most important environmental drivers differed between scales and among landscapes. Our results also highlight the usefulness of key satellite-derived environmental covariates that should be considered when conducting biodiversity analyses in tropical forests.
Start page
1089
End page
1099
Volume
39
Issue
11
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Forestal Ecología
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84959449653
Source
Ecography
ISSN of the container
09067590
Source funding
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Sponsor(s)
We thank subject editor Jens-Christian Svenning for his thoughtful comments on the manuscript. The Carnegie Institution's Biodiversity-Biomass Forest Plot Network and this study were funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus