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Fast demographic traits promote high diversification rates of Amazonian trees

Baker, TR; Gloor, E; Brienen, RJW; Feldpausch, TR; Lopez-Gonzalez, G; Honorio, E; Lewis, SL; ... Vos, VA; + view all (2014) Fast demographic traits promote high diversification rates of Amazonian trees. Ecology Letters , 17 (5) pp. 527-536. 10.1111/ele.12252. Green open access

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Abstract

The Amazon rain forest sustains the world's highest tree diversity, but it remains unclear why some clades of trees are hyperdiverse, whereas others are not. Using dated phylogenies, estimates of current species richness and trait and demographic data from a large network of forest plots, we show that fast demographic traits - short turnover times - are associated with high diversification rates across 51 clades of canopy trees. This relationship is robust to assuming that diversification rates are either constant or decline over time, and occurs in a wide range of Neotropical tree lineages. This finding reveals the crucial role of intrinsic, ecological variation among clades for understanding the origin of the remarkable diversity of Amazonian trees and forests. © 2014 The Authors.

Type: Article
Title: Fast demographic traits promote high diversification rates of Amazonian trees
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/ele.12252
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele.12252
Language: English
Additional information: © 2014 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and CNRS. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Diversity; Generation time; Traits; Tropical forest; Turnover
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1451402
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