TY - JOUR
T1 - Dominance of the suppressed
T2 - Power-law size structure in tropical forests
AU - Farrior, C. E.
AU - Bohlman, S. A.
AU - Hubbell, S.
AU - Pacala, Stephen Wilson
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank J. Chave, H. C. Muller-Landau, and R. Chisholm for helpful discussion and L. Comita for sharing data. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative of Princeton University and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NSF grant no. DBI-1300426, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville). The BCI forest dynamics research project was founded by S. P. Hubbell and R. B. Foster and is now managed by R. Condit, S. Lao, and R. Perez under the Center for Tropical Forest Science and Smithsonian Tropical Research in Panama. Numerous organizations have provided funding, principally in the United States. NSF and hundreds of field workers have contributed. The data are publicly available at http://ctfs.arnarb.harvard.edu/webatlas/datasets/bci.
PY - 2016/1/8
Y1 - 2016/1/8
N2 - Tropical tree size distributions are remarkably consistent despite differences in the environments that support them. With data analysis and theory, we found a simple and biologically intuitive hypothesis to explain this property, which is the foundation of forest dynamics modeling and carbon storage estimates. After a disturbance, new individuals in the forest gap grow quickly in full sun until they begin to overtop one another. The two-dimensional space-filling of the growing crowns of the tallest individuals relegates a group of losing, slow-growing individuals to the understory. Those left in the understory follow a power-law size distribution, the scaling of which depends on only the crown area-to-diameter allometry exponent: a well-conserved value across tropical forests.
AB - Tropical tree size distributions are remarkably consistent despite differences in the environments that support them. With data analysis and theory, we found a simple and biologically intuitive hypothesis to explain this property, which is the foundation of forest dynamics modeling and carbon storage estimates. After a disturbance, new individuals in the forest gap grow quickly in full sun until they begin to overtop one another. The two-dimensional space-filling of the growing crowns of the tallest individuals relegates a group of losing, slow-growing individuals to the understory. Those left in the understory follow a power-law size distribution, the scaling of which depends on only the crown area-to-diameter allometry exponent: a well-conserved value across tropical forests.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84955166589&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84955166589&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1126/science.aad0592
DO - 10.1126/science.aad0592
M3 - Article
C2 - 26744402
AN - SCOPUS:84955166589
VL - 351
SP - 155
EP - 157
JO - Science
JF - Science
SN - 0036-8075
IS - 6269
ER -