TY  - JOUR
AU  - Shipley, B.
AU  - Timothy Paine, C.E.
AU  - Baraloto, C.
PY  - 2012//
TI  - Quantifying the importance of local niche-based and stochastic processes to tropical tree community assembly
T2  - Ecology
JO  - Ecology
SP  - 760
EP  - 769
VL  - 93
IS  - 4
KW  - Community Assembly by Trait Selection
KW  - CATS
KW  - Demographic stochasticity
KW  - Dispersal limitation
KW  - Environmental filtering
KW  - French Guiana
KW  - Functional traits
KW  - Maxent
KW  - Neutral assembly
KW  - Tropical forests
N2  - Although niche-based and stochastic processes, including dispersal limitation and demographic stochasticity, can each contribute to community assembly, it is difficult to quantify the relative importance of each process in natural vegetation. Here, we extend Shipley's maxent model (Community Assembly by Trait Selection, CATS) for the prediction of relative abundances to incorporate both trait-based filtering and dispersal limitation from the larger landscape and develop a statistical decomposition of the proportions of the total information content of relative abundances in local communities that are attributable to traitbased filtering, dispersal limitation, and demographic stochasticity. We apply the method to tree communities in a mature, species-rich, tropical forest in French Guiana at 1-, 0.25-and 0.04-ha scales. Trait data consisted of species' means of 17 functional traits measured over both the entire meta-community and separately in each of nine 1-ha plots. Trait means calculated separately for each site always gave better predictions. There was clear evidence of trait-based filtering at all spatial scales. Trait-based filtering was the most important process at the 1-ha scale (34%), whereas demographic stochasticity was the most important at smaller scales (37-53%). Dispersal limitation from the meta-community was less important and approximately constant across scales (∼9%), and there was also an unresolved association between site-specific traits and meta-community relative abundances. Our method allows one to quantify the relative importance of local niche-based and meta-community processes and demographic stochasticity during community assembly across spatial and temporal scales. © 2012 by the Ecological Society of America.
SN  - 00129658 (Issn)
UR  - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84861352842&partnerID=40&md5=64735b344124e804f33c35fb6b1616c7
N1  - Export Date: 6 June 2012; Source: Scopus; Coden: Ecola; doi: 10.1890/11-0944.1; Language of Original Document: English; Correspondence Address: Shipley, B.; Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC J1K 2R1, Canada; email: Bill.Shipley@USherbrooke.ca
ID  - Shipley_etal2012
ER  -