Continental-scale patterns of canopy tree composition and function across Amazonia

被引:540
作者
ter Steege, Hans
Pitman, Nigel C. A.
Phillips, Oliver L.
Chave, Jerome
Sabatier, Daniel
Duque, Alvaro
Molino, Jean-Francois
Prevost, Marie-Francois
Spichiger, Rodolphe
Castellanos, Hernan
von Hildebrand, Patricio
Vasquez, Rodolfo
机构
[1] Inst Environm Biol, Sect Plant Ecol & Biodivers, NL-3584 CA Utrecht, Netherlands
[2] Natl Herbarium Netherlands, Utrecht Univ Branch, NL-3584 CA Utrecht, Netherlands
[3] Amazon Conservat Assoc, Washington, DC 20009 USA
[4] Univ Leeds, Sch Geog, Earth & Biosphere Inst, Leeds LS2 9JT, W Yorkshire, England
[5] Univ Toulouse 3, CNRS, UMR 5174, F-31062 Toulouse, France
[6] IRD, UMR AMAP, F-34398 Montpellier 5, France
[7] Univ Nacl Colombia, Dept Ciencias Forestales, Medellin 1027, Colombia
[8] IRD, UMR AMAP, Cayenne 97323, French Guiana
[9] Conservatoire & Jardin Bot Ville Geneve, CH-1292 Geneva, Switzerland
[10] UNEG, Puerto Ordaz, Edo Bolivar, Venezuela
[11] Fdn Puerto Rastrojo, Bogota 241438, Colombia
[12] Jardin Bot Missouri, Proyecto Flora Peru, Jaen, Cajamarca, Peru
基金
英国自然环境研究理事会;
关键词
D O I
10.1038/nature05134
中图分类号
O [数理科学和化学]; P [天文学、地球科学]; Q [生物科学]; N [自然科学总论];
学科分类号
07 ; 0710 ; 09 ;
摘要
The world's greatest terrestrial stores of biodiversity and carbon are found in the forests of northern South America, where large-scale biogeographic patterns and processes have recently begun to be described(1-4). Seven of the nine countries with territory in the Amazon basin and the Guiana shield have carried out large-scale forest inventories, but such massive data sets have been little exploited by tropical plant ecologists(5-8). Although forest inventories often lack the species-level identifications favoured by tropical plant ecologists, their consistency of measurement and vast spatial coverage make them ideally suited for numerical analyses at large scales, and a valuable resource to describe the still poorly understood spatial variation of biomass, diversity, community composition and forest functioning across the South American tropics(9). Here we show, by using the seven forest inventories complemented with trait and inventory data collected elsewhere, two dominant gradients in tree composition and function across the Amazon, one paralleling a major gradient in soil fertility and the other paralleling a gradient in dry season length. The data set also indicates that the dominance of Fabaceae in the Guiana shield is not necessarily the result of root adaptations to poor soils ( nodulation or ectomycorrhizal associations) but perhaps also the result of their remarkably high seed mass there as a potential adaptation to low rates of disturbance.
引用
收藏
页码:444 / 447
页数:4
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