Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles
Evolutionary Diversity Is Associated With Wood Productivity in Amazonian Forests
ORCID
0000-0002-7977-9496
ResearcherID
C-6533-2012
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Nature Ecology & Evolution
ISSN
2397-334X
Publication Date
11-11-2019
Abstract
Higher levels of taxonomic and evolutionary diversity are expected to maximize ecosystem function, yet their relative importance in driving variation in ecosystem function at large scales in diverse forests is unknown. Using 90 inventory plots across intact, lowland, terra firme, Amazonian forests and a new phylogeny including 526 angiosperm genera, we investigated the association between taxonomic and evolutionary metrics of diversity and two key measures of ecosystem function: aboveground wood productivity and biomass storage. While taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity were not important predictors of variation in biomass, both emerged as independent predictors of wood productivity. Amazon forests that contain greater evolutionary diversity and a higher proportion of rare species have higher productivity. While climatic and edaphic variables are together the strongest predictors of productivity, our results show that the evolutionary diversity of tree species in diverse forest stands also influences productivity. As our models accounted for wood density and tree size, they also suggest that additional, unstudied, evolutionarily correlated traits have significant effects on ecosystem function in tropical forests. Overall, our pan-Amazonian analysis shows that greater phylogenetic diversity translates into higher levels of ecosystem function: tropical forest communities with more distantly related taxa have greater wood productivity.
DOI
10.1038/s41559-019-1007-y
Volume
3
First Page
1754
Last Page
1761
Additional Comments
NERC grant #s: NE/I028122/1, NE/F005806/1, NE/D005590/1, NE/I028122/1, NE/N012542/1; European Union's Seventh Framework Programme project #s: 283080, 282664
NSUWorks Citation
Fernanda Coelho de Souza, Kyle G. Dexter, Oliver L. Phillips, R. Toby Pennington, Danilo Neves, Martin J. P. Sullivan, Esteban Alvarez-Davila, Atila Alves, Ieda Amaral, Ana Andrade, Luiz E. O. C. Aragao, Alejandro Araujo-Murakami, Eric Arets, Luzmilla Arroyo, Gerardo A. Aymard C., Olaf Banki, Christopher Baraloto, Jorcely Barroso, Rene G. A. Boot, Roel J. W. Brienen, Foster Brown, Jose Luis Camargo, Wendeson Castro, Jerome Chave, Alvaro Cogollo, James A. Comiskey, Fernando Cornejo Valverde, Antonio Lola da Costa, Plinio Barbosa de Camargo, Anthony Di Fiore, Ted R. Feldpausch, David Galbraith, Manuel Gloor, Rosa C. Goodman, Martin Gilpin, Rafael Herrera, Niro Higuchi, Euridice N. Honorio Coronado, Eliana Jimenez-Rojas, Timothy Killeen, Susan Laurance, William Laurance, Gabriela Lopez-Gonzalez, Thomas E. Lovejoy, Yadvinder Malhi, Beatriz Marimon, Ben Hur Marimon Jr., Casimiro Mendoza, Abel Monteagudo-Mendoza, David Neill, Percy Nunez Vargas, Maria C. Penuela-Mora, Georgia C. Pickavance, John J. Pipoly III, Nigel C. A. Pitman, Lourens Poorter, Adriana Prieto, Freddy Ramirez, Anand Roopsind, Agustin Rudas, Rafael P. Salomao, Natalina Silva, Marcos Silveira, James Singh, Juliana Stropp, Hans ter Steege, John Terborgh, Raquel Thomas-Caesar, Ricardo K. Umetsu, Rodolfo V. Vasquez, Ima Célia-Vieira, Simone A. Vieira, Vincent Vos, Roderick J. Zagt, and Timothy R. Baker. 2019. Evolutionary Diversity Is Associated With Wood Productivity in Amazonian Forests .Nature Ecology & Evolution : 1754 -1761. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/occ_facarticles/1116.
Comments
©The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2019