Fast demographic traits promote high diversification rates of Amazonian trees

Abstract

The Amazon rain forest sustains the world's highest tree diversity, but it remains unclear why some clades of trees are hyperdiverse, whereas others are not. Using dated phylogenies, estimates of current species richness and trait and demographic data from a large network of forest plots, we show that fast demographic traits - short turnover times - are associated with high diversification rates across 51 clades of canopy trees. This relationship is robust to assuming that diversification rates are either constant or decline over time, and occurs in a wide range of Neotropical tree lineages. This finding reveals the crucial role of intrinsic, ecological variation among clades for understanding the origin of the remarkable diversity of Amazonian trees and forests.

Metadata

Authors/Creators:

Baker, TR
Pennington, RT
Magallon, S
Gloor, E https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9384-6341
Laurance, WF
Alexiades, M
Alvarez, E
Araujo, A
Arets, EJMM
Aymard, G
de Oliveira, AA
Amaral, I
Arroyo, L
Bonal, D
Brienen, RJW https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5397-5755
Chave, J
Dexter, KG
Di Fiore, A
Eler, E
Feldpausch, TR
Ferreira, L
Lopez-Gonzalez, G https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0814-8830
van der Heijden, G
Higuchi, N
Honorio, E
Huamantupa, I
Killeen, TJ
Laurance, S
Leaño, C
Lewis, SL
Malhi, Y
Marimon, BS
Marimon Junior, BH
Monteagudo Mendoza, A
Neill, D
Peñuela-Mora, MC
Pitman, N
Prieto, A
Quesada, CA
Ramírez, F
Ramírez Angulo, H
Rudas, A
Ruschel, AR
Salomão, RP
de Andrade, AS
Silva, JNM
Silveira, M
Simon, MF
Spironello, W
Steege, HT
Terborgh, J
Toledo, M
Torres-Lezama, A
Vasquez, R
Vieira, ICG
Vilanova, E
Vos, VA
Phillips, OL https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8993-6168

© 2014 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and CNRS.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Keywords:

Diversity; Generation time; Traits; Tropical forest; Turnover

Dates: