Is the number of tree species in small tropical forest plots nonrandom?

Palmer, M. W. and Clark, D. B. and Clark, D. A. (2000) Is the number of tree species in small tropical forest plots nonrandom? Community Ecology, 1 (1). pp. 95-101. ISSN 1585-8553

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Abstract

Tree species richness is remarkably high in many tropical forests, even at very fine spatial scales. However, the study of fine-scale richness is complicated by the rarefaction effect: that is, a trivial correlation between the number of individuals and the number of species. We developed null models to test whether fine-scale species richness differs from random expectation, and applied these models to a dataset of 1170 100 m2 circular plots in the old-growth portion of La Selva Biological Station in the Atlantic Lowlands of Costa Rica. Although species richness in these plots was close to its theoretical maximum, we found that it was frequently lower than null expectation. This was a result of slightly clumped distributions within species. We found no relationships between species richness at the 100 m2 scale and soil type or topography, after accounting for the effects of density.

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