Symposium
The role of functional traits in shaping species coexistence at local and landscape scales
Thu, July 14, 10:30 - 12:30hrs, Barahona 4
Organizer(s):
Imma Oliveras Menor, Claire Fortunel
Identifying the functional proxies of the drivers of community assembly and dynamics is key to improve predictions of the future of tropical systems.
Tropical systems host the world’s largest biodiversity and represent major contributors to global biogeochemical cycles. However, they are particularly threatened by global change, and an urgent goal for ecologists is to decipher the mechanisms generating the highly diverse tropical communities so as to improve predictions of the future of these ecosystems. Disentangling the mechanisms shaping community assembly and dynamics requires going beyond purely taxonomic approaches, and recent advances have integrated species traits to evaluate how variation in functional strategies influence species performance and distribution. The aim of this symposium is to gather insights from trait-based approaches across the tropics to evaluate the role of species functional differences in shaping community assembly and dynamics in tropical systems. The symposium will offer a broad range of perspectives and approaches, from local to regional, in undisturbed and disturbed systems, spanning contrasted environments and different continents. It will provide critical insights to better understand the functional proxies of community assembly and dynamics, and promising way forward to improve predictions of the future of tropical systems with ongoing global change.
Pantropical tree growth response to climate and the mediation effect of species functional traits
David Bauman N/A*, Sean McMahon, Yadvinder Malhi, Sami Rifai, Guillaume Delhaye, Imma Oliveras Menor, Lucas Cernusak, Alexander Shenkin, Erika Berenguer, Stephen Adu-Bredu, Sabine Both, Oliver Phillips and Claire Fortunel
Importance of species abundances representativeness and trait variability for a functional trait community characterization in tropical dry forests
Roy Gonzalez-M.*, Beatriz Salgado-Negret, Fabián Garzón Ramos, Laura Salinas, Carlos Perez-Carmona and Juan Posada
Variation in plant ecophysiological traits along a tropical aridity gradient explained with optimality theory
huanyuan zhang-zheng*, Kasia Ziemi?ska, Imma Oliveras Menor, Theresa Peprah, Jesús Aguirre Gutiérrez, Yadvinder Malhi, Mickey Boakye, Agne Gvozdevaite, Stephen Adu-Bredu, David Sandoval and Iain Colin Prentice
Presentations