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

Alvaro Duque, Helene C. Muller-Landau, Renato Valencia, Dairon Cardenas, Stuart Davies, Alexandre de Oliveira, Álvaro J. Pérez, Hugo Romero-Saltos, Alberto Vicentini

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)669-686
Number of pages18
JournalBiodiversity and Conservation
Volume26
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Mar 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Keywords

  • Aboveground biomass
  • Abundance
  • Fisher’s alpha
  • Forest conservation
  • Rarity
  • Species richness

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