Publication Date:
2006-01-28
Description:
An ecological community's species diversity tends to erode through time as a result of stochastic extinction, competitive exclusion, and unstable host-enemy dynamics. This erosion of diversity can be prevented over the short term if recruits are highly diverse as a result of preferential recruitment of rare species or, alternatively, if rare species survive preferentially, which increases diversity as the ages of the individuals increase. Here, we present census data from seven New and Old World tropical forest dynamics plots that all show the latter pattern. Within local areas, the trees that survived were as a group more diverse than those that were recruited or those that died. The larger (and therefore on average older) survivors were more diverse within local areas than the smaller survivors. When species were rare in a local area, they had a higher survival rate than when they were common, resulting in enrichment for rare species and increasing diversity with age and size class in these complex ecosystems.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Wills, Christopher -- Harms, Kyle E -- Condit, Richard -- King, David -- Thompson, Jill -- He, Fangliang -- Muller-Landau, Helene C -- Ashton, Peter -- Losos, Elizabeth -- Comita, Liza -- Hubbell, Stephen -- Lafrankie, James -- Bunyavejchewin, Sarayudh -- Dattaraja, H S -- Davies, Stuart -- Esufali, Shameema -- Foster, Robin -- Gunatilleke, Nimal -- Gunatilleke, Savitri -- Hall, Pamela -- Itoh, Akira -- John, Robert -- Kiratiprayoon, Somboon -- de Lao, Suzanne Loo -- Massa, Marie -- Nath, Cheryl -- Noor, Md Nur Supardi -- Kassim, Abdul Rahman -- Sukumar, Raman -- Suresh, Hebbalalu Satyanarayana -- Sun, I-Fang -- Tan, Sylvester -- Yamakura, Takuo -- Zimmerman, Jess -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2006 Jan 27;311(5760):527-31.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0116, USA. cwills@ucsd.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16439661" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Biodiversity
;
*Ecosystem
;
Population Density
;
Population Dynamics
;
*Trees/growth & development
;
Tropical Climate
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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