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
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.
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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 -