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Springer (part of Springer Nature), Biodiversity and Conservation, 5(24), p. 1073-1087

DOI: 10.1007/s10531-014-0843-y

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Commonness and rarity determinants of woody plants in different types of tropical forests

Journal article published in 2014 by Gabriel Arellano ORCID, M. Isabel Loza, J. Sebastián Tello, ManuelJ Macía ORCID
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

The aim of this work is to examine whether there exists a link between local and landscape patterns of species commonness, and if these are related to morphological traits in tropical plant communities. The Madidi region (Bolivian tropical Andes) is selected as study location. We estimated local and landscape commonness, rarity classes, height, diameter, number of stems, and habit for >2,300 species. We employed correlations to evaluate the relationship between local scale commonness and landscape scale commonness. We performed ANCOVA and multinomial logistic regressions to predict commonness and rarity variables from the morphological traits. We repeated the analyses for six different forest types, including dry forests and wet forests along a 3,477 m elevation gradient. We found a positive relationship between local and landscape commonness in all forest types. Additionally, we found that, plant height influences the local and landscape commonness, and that the apportioning of species into rarity classes depends greatly on the species habit and, at lesser degree, on the number of stems. Our main conclusions are: (1) Approaches to commonness and rarity based on abundance only or occurrence only could summarize most of the relevant information to characterize commonness and rarity patterns: both approaches, in practice, do not supply independent information. (2) The species traits determine which species are rare and which ones are common, which indicates that commonness and rarity patterns are the result of non-neutral trait-based community assembly processes.