Authors
Natalia Norden, Héctor A Angarita, Frans Bongers, Miguel Martínez-Ramos, Iñigo Granzow-de la Cerda, Michiel Van Breugel, Edwin Lebrija-Trejos, Jorge A Meave, John Vandermeer, G Bruce Williamson, Bryan Finegan, Rita Mesquita, Robin L Chazdon
Publication date
2015/6/30
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
112
Issue
26
Pages
8013-8018
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Description
Although forest succession has traditionally been approached as a deterministic process, successional trajectories of vegetation change vary widely, even among nearby stands with similar environmental conditions and disturbance histories. Here, we provide the first attempt, to our knowledge, to quantify predictability and uncertainty during succession based on the most extensive long-term datasets ever assembled for Neotropical forests. We develop a novel approach that integrates deterministic and stochastic components into different candidate models describing the dynamical interactions among three widely used and interrelated forest attributes—stem density, basal area, and species density. Within each of the seven study sites, successional trajectories were highly idiosyncratic, even when controlling for prior land use, environment, and initial conditions in these attributes. Plot factors were far more important …
Scholar articles
N Norden, HA Angarita, F Bongers, M Martínez-Ramos… - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015