I'm working on community assemblages in tropical rain forest vegetation in India. When we looked at some of our results, we see that the species diversity has increased with increasing age classes with in the same habitat. usually trees had the highest diversity followed by saplings and seedlings. Similar pattern was also reported from studies else where (Cleary et al, 2006 - Borneo; Anitha et al, 2010 - India). Could any one explain this pattern? relevant literature suggestions are highly appreciated.
Don't you mean diversity INCREASES with plant age? You wrote tree > sapling > seedling. It is because negative plant–soil feedbacks impair seedling survival near conspecific trees, which enhances forest diversity.
See: Tree diversity modifies distance-dependent effects on seedling emergence but not plant–soil feedbacks of temperate trees, Ecology, Volume 96, Issue 6, June 2015, Pages 1529–1539, DOI: 10.1890/14-1166.1.
I hope this helps :)
Thank you Andrew! yes you are right, i meant species increases with plant age. I have edited the question now. Thanks for pointing it out and also for sharing your insight.
While working on central Himalayan temperate forests I also found same trends . Now point is that what importance value are you taking into account while calculating diversity values. When I used the density of woody species the trend was very sharp , on computing using basal area values , the trend was not so sharp.I tried to understand the phenomenon .When basal area was used , the values exhibited a d-d curves which were not exactly log normal indicating lesser degree of vegetation stability however , when d-d curves were drawn using density values d-d curves were absolutely log normal . This pattern indicated that proportional species richness in a forest stand has more impact on increasing diversity diversity values . Rain forests are very species rich , higher size classes in population structure supporting higher diversity is perhaps due to larger differences in relative basal ares of different size class density values of various tree species . Regards .
hello Nehru,
see this article..it may help :
Lu J, Jiang L, Yu L, Sun Q (2011) Local Factors Determine Plant Community Structure on Closely Neighbored Islands. PLoS ONE 6(5): e19762. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0019762.
regards.
Attached for confirmation of your observed trend, a reverse trend and an (incomplete) explanation.
Article Does forest restoration using taungya foster tree species di...
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