Speaker: Dr. Vanessa Rubio, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Understanding the processes maintaining species richness and abundance is particularly relevant for highly diverse communities such as tropical forests. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the maintenance of many species and forest functionality in a continuum between neutral- and niche-based frameworks. Integrating functional traits into community ecology has improved and refined our interpretability of the main processes assembling plant communities. In particular, niche differentiation by a few key functional groups has been suggested to play an essential role in capturing the emergent patterns observed in tropical forests. In a completely stochastic framework, trees should die random regardless their taxonomic and functional identity, however, research on tropical giant trees show that species-specific functional traits play an important role in driving interspecific variation in mortality.
In this seminar, Dr. Rubio will present research on (1) the integration of functional groups into forest dynamics using the neutral- and niche-based frameworks, and (2) on the interspecific variation of giant tree mortality and its functional basis.
