Muller-Landau Helene C, Condit Richard S, Harms Kyle E, Marks Christian O, Thomas Sean C, Bunyavejchewin Sarayudh, Chuyong George, Co Leonardo, Davies Stuart, Foster Robin, Gunatilleke Savitri, Gunatilleke Nimal, Hart Terese, Hubbell Stephen P, Itoh Akira, Kassim Abd Rahman, Kenfack David, LaFrankie James V, Lagunzad Daniel, Lee Hua Seng, Losos Elizabeth, Makana Jean-Remy, Ohkubo Tatsuhiro, Samper Cristian, Sukumar Raman, Sun I-Fang, Nur Supardi M N, Tan Sylvester, Thomas Duncan, Thompson Jill, Valencia Renato, Vallejo Martha Isabel, Muñoz Gorky Villa, Yamakura Takuo, Zimmerman Jess K, Dattaraja Handanakere Shavaramaiah, Esufali Shameema, Hall Pamela, He Fangliang, Hernandez Consuelo, Kiratiprayoon Somboon, Suresh Hebbalalu S, Wills Christopher, Ashton Peter
Ecol Lett. 2006 May;9(5):589-602. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2006.00915.x.
Tropical forests vary substantially in the densities of trees of different sizes and thus in above-ground biomass and carbon stores. However, these tree size distributions show fundamental similarities suggestive of underlying general principles. The theory of metabolic ecology predicts that tree abundances will scale as the -2 power of diameter. Demographic equilibrium theory explains tree abundances in terms of the scaling of growth and mortality. We use demographic equilibrium theory to derive analytic predictions for tree size distributions corresponding to different growth and mortality functions. We test both sets of predictions using data from 14 large-scale tropical forest plots encompassing censuses of 473 ha and > 2 million trees. The data are uniformly inconsistent with the predictions of metabolic ecology. In most forests, size distributions are much closer to the predictions of demographic equilibrium, and thus, intersite variation in size distributions is explained partly by intersite variation in growth and mortality.
热带森林中不同大小树木的密度差异很大，因此地上生物量和碳储量也各不相同。然而，这些树木大小分布呈现出一些基本的相似性，暗示着潜在的一般规律。代谢生态学理论预测，树木数量将与直径的 -2 次方成比例。种群平衡理论从生长和死亡率的比例关系来解释树木数量。我们运用种群平衡理论来推导与不同生长和死亡率函数相对应的树木大小分布的解析预测。我们使用来自 14 个大型热带森林样地的数据对这两组预测进行检验，这些样地涵盖了 473 公顷的普查区域以及超过 200 万棵树木。这些数据与代谢生态学的预测始终不一致。在大多数森林中，大小分布更接近种群平衡的预测，因此，大小分布的站点间差异部分可由生长和死亡率的站点间差异来解释。
