Print PageNo understanding of species coexistence is possible without explicit consideration of spatial distribution of species. Here, we evaluated four competing theories about the relative importance of two major spatial constructing processes, habitat heterogeneity and dispersal limitation, to the distributions of over 275 tree species in three large scale stem-mapped plots in tropical, subtropical and temperate forests. We developed a new method based on spatial point pattern modeling to decompose variance of species distribution into contributions of the two major processes.
Results/Conclusions
Our results show that the effects of habitat heterogeneity and dispersal limitation are much more pervasive among species than previously presented for each of the plots, and dispersal limitation consistently dominates over habitat heterogeneity in forming spatial distribution of most species across all studied plots.
