Detailseite
Projekt
From species' traits to forest dynamics - A niche detector for hyperdiverse tropical forests
Antragstellerin
Dr. Nadja Rüger
Fachliche Zuordnung
Ökologie und Biodiversität der Pflanzen und Ökosysteme
Förderung
Förderung von 2013 bis 2020
Projektkennung
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 229968099
Understanding the degree to which ecological niches structure tropical tree communities requires an understanding of life-history strategies of hundreds of coexisting tree species which differ in functional traits, demography and resource use. My principal research goal is to quantify how the functional traits of the tree species combine to define demographic rates and responses to resource availability, and how between-species variation in life-history strategies drives forest dynamics and species coexistence. To this end, I will link demographic rates and their sensitivity to light and soil moisture to functional traits of >250 tree species of Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, one of the best studied tropical rainforests. I propose to interpolate the heterogeneous pattern of soil moisture from a dense grid of new measurements and to use hierarchical Bayesian models to elucidate the relative roles of light availability (derived from canopy census data) and soil moisture for demographic rates and how these are driven by functional traits. In order to evaluate the consequences of between-species variation in demography and resource use for emergent forest properties, this information will be integrated into a structurally-realistic forest simulation model. I will adopt a novel modeling approach that reduces the high-dimensional characterization of allometry and demography of single tree species to few trade-off axes reflecting continuous (and maximum) variation of life-history strategies between the >250 tree species. The validated model will be used to conduct modeling experiments to explore key questions of tropical forest ecology, e.g. How do interactions of light availability and soil moisture drive forest succession and species' habitat associations? Which strategy axis is most efficient in creating coexistence and which niche dimension(s) does it reflect? This research will yield a baseline model of BCI forest dynamics for the research community to use and build upon. It will identify a set of key functional traits that should be a research priority in less studied forests and would allow a first estimate of possible species' parameters. In the future, the trade-off axis approach may facilitate model application in other tropical forests and represent a first step towards the integration of continuous tropical tree life-histories and resource competition into dynamic global vegetation models.
DFG-Verfahren
Sachbeihilfen
Internationaler Bezug
Großbritannien, Panama
