Functional Traits Explain Growth Strategies of Tropical Tree Species

Relationships between functional traits and growth rates can provide insight into the functional constraints and trade-offs underlying life-history strategies of tropical tree species. However, tree growth in the tropics has rarely been measured at the species level, and species’ differences in growth strategies remain poorly understood. Only recently, long-term permanent plots are providing information to analyze growth rates as well as their response to light availability and tree size across entire diverse tree communities comprising hundreds of tree species, many of them rare. In this talk, I will first demonstrate how hierarchical Bayesian models can be used to quantify species’ differences in growth strategies while accounting for several sources of uncertainty inherent in ecological data. Then, I will present a predictive model which allows estimation of growth characteristics from a few easily measurable functional traits of the species.

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