Biomedical subjects

Jérôme Chave

Publications and source records attributed to Jérôme Chave.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Theoretical biology: comparing models of species abundance.

Ecologists are struggling to explain how so many tropical tree species can coexist in tropical forests, and several empirical studies have demonstrated that negative density dependence is an important mechanism of tree-species coexistence. Volkov et al. compare a model incorporating negative density dependence with a dispersal-limited neutral model and claim that each predicts six empirical species-abundance distributions of tropical-tree communities equally well. However, we show here that their main conclusion is premature: when the two models are compared in an improved analysis, we find that the dispersal-limited model outcompetes the density-dependent model in all six cases. Hence, although density dependence is certainly an important diversity-maintaining mechanism, our improved approach indicates that the dispersal-limited model provides a more parsimonious explanation of empirical species-abundance distributions.

Biodiversity↗

PubMed2006

Regional and phylogenetic variation of wood density across 2456 Neotropical tree species.

Wood density is a crucial variable in carbon accounting programs of both secondary and old-growth tropical forests. It also is the best single descriptor of wood: it correlates with numerous morphological, mechanical, physiological, and ecological properties. To explore the extent to which wood density could be estimated for rare or poorly censused taxa, and possible sources of variation in this trait, we analyzed regional, taxonomic, and phylogenetic variation in wood density among 2456 tree species from Central and South America. Wood density varied over more than one order of magnitude across species, with an overall mean of 0.645 g/cm3. Our geographical analysis showed significant decreases in wood density with increasing altitude and significant differences among low-altitude geographical regions: wet forests of Central America and western Amazonia have significantly lower mean wood density than dry forests of Central and South America, eastern and central Amazonian forests, and the Atlantic forests of Brazil; and eastern Amazonian forests have lower wood densities than the dry forests and the Atlantic forest. A nested analysis of variance showed that 74% of the species-level wood density variation was explained at the genus level, 34% at the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) family level, and 19% at the APG order level. This indicates that genus-level means give reliable approximations of values of species, except in a few hypervariable genera. We also studied which evolutionary shifts in wood density occurred in the phylogeny of seed plants using a composite phylogenetic tree. Major changes were observed at deep nodes (Eurosid 1), and also in more recent divergences (for instance in the Rhamnoids, Simaroubaceae, and Anacardiaceae). Our unprecedented wood density data set yields consistent guidelines for estimating wood densities when species-level information is lacking and should significantly reduce error in Central and South American carbon accounting programs.

Altitude↗

PubMed2002

Beta-diversity in tropical forest trees.

The high alpha-diversity of tropical forests has been amply documented, but beta-diversity-how species composition changes with distance-has seldom been studied. We present quantitative estimates of beta-diversity for tropical trees by comparing species composition of plots in lowland terra firme forest in Panama, Ecuador, and Peru. We compare observations with predictions derived from a neutral model in which habitat is uniform and only dispersal and speciation influence species turnover. We find that beta-diversity is higher in Panama than in western Amazonia and that patterns in both areas are inconsistent with the neutral model. In Panama, habitat variation appears to increase species turnover relative to Amazonia, where unexpectedly low turnover over great distances suggests that population densities of some species are bounded by as yet unidentified processes. At intermediate scales in both regions, observations can be matched by theory, suggesting that dispersal limitation, with speciation, influences species turnover.

Ecosystem↗

PubMed2002

A spatially explicit neutral model of beta-diversity in tropical forests.

To represent species turnover in tropical rain forest, we use a neutral model where a tree's fate is not affected by what species it belongs to, seeds disperse a limited distance from their parents, and speciation is in equilibrium with random extinction. We calculate the similarity function, the probability F(r) that two trees separated by a distance r belong to the same species, assuming that the dispersal kernel P(r), the distribution of seeds about their parents and the prospects of mortality and reproduction, are the same for all trees regardless of their species. If P(r) is radially symmetric Gaussian with mean-square dispersal distance sigma, F(r) can be expressed in closed form. If P(r) is a radially symmetric Cauchy distribution, then, in two-dimensional space, F(r) is proportional to 1/r for large r. Analytical results are compared with individual-based simulations, and the relevance to field observations is discussed.

Ecosystem↗