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Habitat heterogeneity and niche structure of trees in two tropical rain forests

  • Community Ecology
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Abstract

Dispersal-assembly theories of species coexistence posit that environmental factors play no role in explaining community diversity and structure. Dispersal-assembly theories shed light on some aspects of community structure such as species-area and species-abundance relationships. However, species’ environmental associations also affect these measures of community structure. Measurements of species’ niche breadth and overlap address this influence. Using a new continuous measure of niche and a dispersal-assembly null model that maintains species’ niche breadth and aggregation, we tested two hypotheses assessing the effects of habitat heterogeneity on the ability of dispersal-assembly theories to explain community niche structure. We found that in both homogenous and heterogeneous environments dispersal-assembly theories cannot fully explain observed niche structure. The performance of the dispersal-assembly null models was particularly poor in heterogeneous environments. These results indicate that non-dispersal based mechanisms are in part responsible for observed community structure and measures of community structure which include species’ environmental associations should be used to test theories of species diversity.

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Acknowledgements

M.D.P. was supported by an NSF Bioinformatics Post-Doctoral Fellowship, DBI-0204070 and 1-year post-doctoral research fellowship provided by the Center for International Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. The research was supported by NSF grant DEB-0075334. We would like to thank Peter Ashton who provided comments on early drafts of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92039, USA

    Matthew D. Potts

  2. Center for Tropical Forest Science-Arnold Arboretum Asia Program, Harvard University, 22 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

    Stuart J. Davies

  3. Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 002138, USA

    William H. Bossert

  4. Forest Department, 93660, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia

    S. Tan

  5. Forest Research Institute of Malaysia Kepong, 52109, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    M. N. Nur Supardi

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  1. Matthew D. Potts
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  2. Stuart J. Davies
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  3. William H. Bossert
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  4. S. Tan
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  5. M. N. Nur Supardi
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Correspondence to Stuart J. Davies.

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Potts, M.D., Davies, S.J., Bossert, W.H. et al. Habitat heterogeneity and niche structure of trees in two tropical rain forests. Oecologia 139, 446–453 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-004-1525-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-004-1525-3

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