Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Declan L M Cooper; Simon L Lewis; Martin J P Sullivan; Paulo I Prado; Hans ter Steege; Nicolas Barbier; Ferry Slik; Bonaventure Sonke; Corneille E N Ewango; Stephen Adu-Bredu; See article text for complete list of authors; John Herbohn; Sharif A Mukul; Andrew Marshall

doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06820-z

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Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

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Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Declan L M Cooper, Simon L Lewis, Martin J P Sullivan, Paulo I Prado, Hans ter Steege, Nicolas Barbier, Ferry Slik, Bonaventure Sonke, Corneille E N Ewango, Stephen Adu-Bredu, …

Nature, Vol.625, pp.728-734

2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06820-z

PMCID: PMC10808064

PMID: 38200314

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Abstract

biodiversity

ecosystem ecology

forest ecology

macroecology

tropical ecology

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations1,2,3,4,5,6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories7, we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world’s most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees.

Details

Title: Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities
Authors: Declan L M Cooper (Corresponding Author) - University College London
Simon L Lewis (Corresponding Author) - University of Leeds
Martin J P Sullivan (Author) - University of Leeds
Paulo I Prado (Author) - Universidade de São Paulo
Hans ter Steege (Author) - Naturalis Biodiversity Center
Nicolas Barbier (Author) - Université de Montpellier
Ferry Slik (Author) - Universiti Brunei Darussalam
Bonaventure Sonke (Author) - Université de Yaoundé I
Corneille E N Ewango (Author) - Université de Kisangani
Stephen Adu-Bredu (Author) - Forestry Research Institute of Ghana
See article text for complete list of authors (Author)
John Herbohn (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Tropical Forests and People Research Centre
Sharif A Mukul (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Tropical Forests and People Research Centre
Andrew Marshall (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Forest Research Institute
Publication details: Nature, Vol.625, pp.728-734
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
Date published: 2024
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06820-z
ISSN: 1476-4687
PMID: 38200314; PMC10808064
Copyright note: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Data Availability: The species abundance data that support the findings of this study are available from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21670883 (formatting notes: a column for each species, rows for each plot, entries are the number of trees ≥10 cm diameter of each species in each plot). WorldClim69 bioclimatic data are available from https://www.worldclim.org/data/bioclim.html.
Organisation Unit: Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research; Tropical Forests and People Research Centre; School of Science, Technology and Engineering; Forest Research Institute
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99999998502621
Output Type: Journal article