About Us
News
Announcement
Research
Conservation & Horticulture
Public Education
Graduate Study
Scientist
International Cooperation
Resources
Annual Reports
Publications & Papers
Visit XTBG
Societies
XTBG Seminar
Open Positions
4th XSBN Symposium
CAS-SEABRI
PFS-Tropical Asia
Links
 
   Location:Home > News > News Updates
A framework to study tree-tree interactions across scales within forests proposed
Author: YANG Jie
ArticleSource:
Update time: 2013-05-08
Close
Text Size: A A A
Print

 

There has been little study investigating whether individual tree species in forest communities tend to be accumulators or repellers of phylogenetic diversity or whether species accumulators and repellers have non-random distributions on the phylogenetic tree itself.

To address the issue, Prof. CAO Min and his team of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) proposed a framework for utilizing individual species and phylogenetic information to study tree-tree interactions across scales within forests. In the study, they first quantified the individual species-area relationship (ISAR) in nine temperate and tropical forest dynamics forest plots across latitude and then put the result into a phylogenetic context. The second way they integrated the ISAR and phylogenies was to quantify whether species accumulators and repellers had non-random distributions on community phylogenies.

The researchers asked: (1) what was the phylogenetic diversity of the neighborhoods of accumulator, repeller and neutral species and was it any different from a random expectation?; and (2) what was the distribution of accumulator, repeller and neutral species on the phylogenetic tree?

Their results suggested that biotic interactions on individual-level distributions in communities were strongest at spatial scales r<30 m in the nine tropical and temperate forests and that the phylogenetic diversity surrounding the individuals of species was generally only non-random on very local scales. In particular, the distribution of species accumulators and repellers was non-random on the community phylogenies suggesting the presence of phylogenetic signal in the ISAR across latitude.

The study entitled “A Phylogenetic Perspective on the Individual Species-Area Relationship in Temperate and Tropical Tree Communities” has been published in PLoS ONE 8(5): e63192. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063192

Xishuangbanna tropical forest dynamics plot, one of the nine studied plots (Image by LIN Luxiang)

  Appendix Download
Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Menglun, Mengla, Yunnan 666303, China
Copyright XTBG 2005-2014 Powered by XTBG Information Center