Do young tropical restoration plantations exhibit a phylogenetic pattern that suggests the influence of biotic processes affecting species composition?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Environmental Sciences
- Keywords
- restoration, species interactions, phylogenetic ecology, tropical rain forest, community assembly
- Copyright
- © 2014 Schweizer et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Do young tropical restoration plantations exhibit a phylogenetic pattern that suggests the influence of biotic processes affecting species composition? PeerJ PrePrints 2:e625v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.625v1
Abstract
One approach in forest restoration is to plant trees that will establish an initial canopy to promote forest recovery through natural recruitment of other species. Here we evaluate the patterns of either phylogenetic overdispersion or phylogenetic clustering on community assembly beneath seven different single-species tree plantations. We expected the presence of negative biotic interactions between closely related overstory and recruiting tree species, as well as among related recruiting species, to lead to phylogenetic overdispersion. We found no evidence for inhibition of close relatives of the overstory tree species. However, we found more understory species than expected that were very distantly related to the overstory tree when the canopy was comprised of Fabaceae species, which lead to the presence of similar species in the understory of legume species. We found weak phylogenetic patterns among species in the understory community that suggest the presence of random processes of community assembly, maybe due to the young age of the understory communities studied.
Author Comment
Thia is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Naturally colonizing species sampled
Table S1 - Naturally colonizing species sampled. Habit codes S, U, M and T are free-standing, species with maximum heights of 5, 10, 20 and > 30 m, respectively. These species are found in the old-growth forest of Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Most habits and dispersal syndromes come from databases provided by Joe Wright and published in Wright, 2007 ; Wright et al., 2007 ; Wright et al., 2010 . Other sources noted. Species names with an (*) means that those species were observed at frequencies of five stems or more.
Newick File
Newick file of species of understory natural recruits and overstory species. Species names are coded using the APG3 six-letters coding system, which is the first four letters of the genus plus the first two letters of the species (see Table S1 for reference).