The keystone plant resources (KPR) concept describes certain plant species in tropical forests as vital to community stability and diversity because they provide food resources to vertebrate ...consumers during the season of scarcity. Here, we use an 8-y, continuous record of fruit fall from a 1.44-ha mature forest stand to identify potential KPRs in a lowland western Amazonian rain forest. KPRs were identified based on four criteria: temporal non-redundancy; year-to-year reliability; abundance of reproductive-size individuals and inferred fruit crop size; and the variety of vertebrate consumers utilizing their fruit. Overall, seven species were considered excellent KPRs: two of these belong to the genus Ficus, confirming that this taxon is a KPR as previously suggested. Celtis iguanaea (Cannabaceae) – a canopy liana – has also been previously classified as a KPR; in addition, Pseudomalmea diclina (Annonaceae), Cissus ulmifolia (Vitaceae), Allophylus glabratus (Sapindaceae) and Trichilia elegans (Meliaceae) are newly identified KPRs. Our results confirm that a very small fraction (<5%) of the plant community consistently provides fruit for a broad set of consumers during the period of resource scarcity, which has significant implications for the conservation and management of Amazonian forests.
The carbon sink capacity of tropical forests is substantially affected by tree mortality. However, the main drivers of tropical tree death remain largely unknown. Here we present a pan-Amazonian ...assessment of how and why trees die, analysing over 120,000 trees representing > 3800 species from 189 long-term RAINFOR forest plots. While tree mortality rates vary greatly Amazon-wide, on average trees are as likely to die standing as they are broken or uprooted-modes of death with different ecological consequences. Species-level growth rate is the single most important predictor of tree death in Amazonia, with faster-growing species being at higher risk. Within species, however, the slowest-growing trees are at greatest risk while the effect of tree size varies across the basin. In the driest Amazonian region species-level bioclimatic distributional patterns also predict the risk of death, suggesting that these forests are experiencing climatic conditions beyond their adaptative limits. These results provide not only a holistic pan-Amazonian picture of tree death but large-scale evidence for the overarching importance of the growth-survival trade-off in driving tropical tree mortality.
Purpose: To better understand clinic attendees ‘perceptions of nonsterile glove (NSG) use during vaccination and their concern for the environment. Design: This was a cross-sectional, ...self-administered, in-person survey. Methods: A non-random volunteer sample of vaccination clinic attendees (n = 789) completed a survey assessing their perception of NSG use during influenza vaccination administration and their concern for the environment. Findings: Nearly all respondents equated NSG use with increased safety and professionalism. More than half of respondents reported feeling concerned about environmental waste associated with NSG use. Conclusions: NSG are not indicated for routine vaccination. Adherence to evidence-based practices on NSG use during vaccination can substantially reduce associated medical waste. Nurses can lead by example by only using NSG when indicated.
Aim
Water availability is the major driver of tropical forest structure and dynamics. Most research has focused on the impacts of climatic water availability, whereas remarkably little is known about ...the influence of water table depth and excess soil water on forest processes. Nevertheless, given that plants take up water from the soil, the impacts of climatic water supply on plants are likely to be modulated by soil water conditions.
Location
Lowland Amazonian forests.
Time period
1971–2019.
Methods
We used 344 long‐term inventory plots distributed across Amazonia to analyse the effects of long‐term climatic and edaphic water supply on forest functioning. We modelled forest structure and dynamics as a function of climatic, soil‐water and edaphic properties.
Results
Water supplied by both precipitation and groundwater affects forest structure and dynamics, but in different ways. Forests with a shallow water table (depth <5 m) had 18% less above‐ground woody productivity and 23% less biomass stock than forests with a deep water table. Forests in drier climates (maximum cumulative water deficit < −160 mm) had 21% less productivity and 24% less biomass than those in wetter climates. Productivity was affected by the interaction between climatic water deficit and water table depth. On average, in drier climates the forests with a shallow water table had lower productivity than those with a deep water table, with this difference decreasing within wet climates, where lower productivity was confined to a very shallow water table.
Main conclusions
We show that the two extremes of water availability (excess and deficit) both reduce productivity in Amazon upland (terra‐firme) forests. Biomass and productivity across Amazonia respond not simply to regional climate, but rather to its interaction with water table conditions, exhibiting high local differentiation. Our study disentangles the relative contribution of those factors, helping to improve understanding of the functioning of tropical ecosystems and how they are likely to respond to climate change.
While Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, the abundance of trees is skewed strongly towards relatively few 'hyperdominant' species. In addition to their diversity, Amazonian trees are a ...key component of the global carbon cycle, assimilating and storing more carbon than any other ecosystem on Earth. Here we ask, using a unique data set of 530 forest plots, if the functions of storing and producing woody carbon are concentrated in a small number of tree species, whether the most abundant species also dominate carbon cycling, and whether dominant species are characterized by specific functional traits. We find that dominance of forest function is even more concentrated in a few species than is dominance of tree abundance, with only ≈1% of Amazon tree species responsible for 50% of carbon storage and productivity. Although those species that contribute most to biomass and productivity are often abundant, species maximum size is also influential, while the identity and ranking of dominant species varies by function and by region.
In this Letter, a middle initial and additional affiliation have been added for author G. J. Nabuurs; two statements have been added to the Supplementary Acknowledgements; and a citation to the ...French National Institute has been added to the Methods; see accompanying Author Correction for further details.
The Janzen–Connell (JC) effect, which hypothesizes that recruitment and growth of seedlings is positively correlated to the distance from the parent tree, is shown to generate highly organized ...vegetation biomass spatial patterns when coupled to a revised Fisher–Kolmogorov (FK) equation. Spatial organization arises through a novel mechanism of non-local activation and local inhibition. Over a single generation, the revised FK model calculations predict a “hen and chicks” dynamic pattern with mature trees surrounded by new seedlings growing at characteristic spatial distances in agreement with field data. Over longer timescales, the importance of stochastic dynamics, such as those associated with randomly occurring light gaps, increase thereby causing a substantial deviation between predictions from the deterministic FK model and its stochastic counterpart derived to account for such random disturbances. At still longer timescales, however, statistical measures of the spatial organization, specifically the spatial density of mature trees and their minimum spacing, converge between these two model representations.
The conservation of tropical forest carbon stocks offers the opportunity to curb climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and simultaneously conserve biodiversity. ...However, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which carbon stock conservation will provide benefits to biodiversity in part because whether forests that contain high carbon density in their aboveground biomass also contain high animal diversity is unknown. Here, we empirically examined medium to large bodied ground-dwelling mammal and bird (hereafter "wildlife") diversity and carbon stock levels within the tropics using camera trap and vegetation data from a pantropical network of sites. Specifically, we tested whether tropical forests that stored more carbon contained higher wildlife species richness, taxonomic diversity, and trait diversity. We found that carbon stocks were not a significant predictor for any of these three measures of diversity, which suggests that benefits for wildlife diversity will not be maximized unless wildlife diversity is explicitly taken into account; prioritizing carbon stocks alone will not necessarily meet biodiversity conservation goals. We recommend conservation planning that considers both objectives because there is the potential for more wildlife diversity and carbon stock conservation to be achieved for the same total budget if both objectives are pursued in tandem rather than independently. Tropical forests with low elevation variability and low tree density supported significantly higher wildlife diversity. These tropical forest characteristics may provide more affordable proxies of wildlife diversity for future multi-objective conservation planning when fine scale data on wildlife are lacking.
Extinction rates in the Anthropocene are three orders of magnitude higher than background and disproportionately occur in the tropics, home of half the world's species. Despite global efforts to ...combat tropical species extinctions, lack of high-quality, objective information on tropical biodiversity has hampered quantitative evaluation of conservation strategies. In particular, the scarcity of population-level monitoring in tropical forests has stymied assessment of biodiversity outcomes, such as the status and trends of animal populations in protected areas. Here, we evaluate occupancy trends for 511 populations of terrestrial mammals and birds, representing 244 species from 15 tropical forest protected areas on three continents. For the first time to our knowledge, we use annual surveys from tropical forests worldwide that employ a standardized camera trapping protocol, and we compute data analytics that correct for imperfect detection. We found that occupancy declined in 22%, increased in 17%, and exhibited no change in 22% of populations during the last 3-8 years, while 39% of populations were detected too infrequently to assess occupancy changes. Despite extensive variability in occupancy trends, these 15 tropical protected areas have not exhibited systematic declines in biodiversity (i.e., occupancy, richness, or evenness) at the community level. Our results differ from reports of widespread biodiversity declines based on aggregated secondary data and expert opinion and suggest less extreme deterioration in tropical forest protected areas. We simultaneously fill an important conservation data gap and demonstrate the value of large-scale monitoring infrastructure and powerful analytics, which can be scaled to incorporate additional sites, ecosystems, and monitoring methods. In an era of catastrophic biodiversity loss, robust indicators produced from standardized monitoring infrastructure are critical to accurately assess population outcomes and identify conservation strategies that can avert biodiversity collapse.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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