Spatial patterns of conspecific trees are considered as consequences of biological interactions and environmental influences. It also reflects resource partitioning and niche divergence in plant communities. As raising attentions are paid to spatial patterns of tropical forest trees, several tropical forests in Asia and America have presented analogously high proportions of clumped distributed species coincidently. To approach factors contributing to this cross-continent pattern of clumped distribution of most conspecific trees in the tropics, we obtained and reviewed ecosystem attributes, including topography, temperature, precipitation, biodiversity, density, and biomass, of these forests.
Results/Conclusions
Our results showed that the numbers of aggregated species are tightly linearly correlated to local biodiversity of these forests. Furthermore, the proportions of aggregated species are actually constants which are neutral from any other ecosystem attributes regardless the differences of these forests. Here we show that forests located in different biogeographical regions in the tropics are capable of harboring about a consistent amount of aggregated species which can be predicted by their local biodiversity. This finding definitely provides an innovated vision of biodiversity on spatial patterns in the tropics by presenting the tight relationship between them. Furthermore, it also emphasizes the importance of long-ignorant biological interactions over environmental factors in deliberating relevant theories of forest communities in the tropic across the globe.
