%0 Journal Article
%T The Functional Ecology and Diversity of Tropical Tree Assemblages through Space and Time: From Local to Regional and from Traits to Transcriptomes
%A Nathan G. Swenson
%J ISRN Forestry
%D 2012
%R 10.5402/2012/743617
%X Tropical tree biodiversity motivates an extremely large amount of research and some of the most passionate debates in ecology and evolution. Research into tropical tree biodiversity generally has been very biased towards one axis of biodiversity-species diversity. Less work has focused on the functional diversity of tropical trees and I argue that this has greatly limited our ability to not only understand the species diversity in tropical tree assemblages, but their distributions through space and time. Increasingly plant ecologists have turned to measuring plant functional traits to estimate functional diversity and to uncover the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms underlying the distribution and dynamics of tropical trees. Here I review much of the recent work on functional traits in tropical tree community ecology. I will highlight what I believe are the most important findings and which research directions are not likely to progress in the future. I also argue that functionally based investigations of tropical trees are likely to be revolutionized in the coming years through the incorporation of functional genomic approaches. The paper ends with a discussion of three major research areas or areas in need of focus that could lead to rapid advances in functionally based investigations of tropical trees. 1. Introduction Tropical forests are among the most awe-inspiring ecosystems on the planet. Tropical communities and their biological diversity have presented one of the great persistent challenges to ecologists and evolutionary biologists [1¨C13]. How can so many species coexist? How was so much diversity generated? Is there any underlying deterministic process structuring these communities or are they an intractable and stochastic compilation? These are the fundamental questions that biologists routinely ask when confronted with tropical tree biodiversity. Critical to answering these questions is our understanding of how tropical tree species functionally interact with their abiotic and biotic environments through space and time and how tropical tree functional diversity has evolved [14]. Over the past decade functional biology has played an increasingly important role in tropical tree ecology. For years the majority of this work focused on a handful of species at a time and how they functionally interact with the environment [15¨C18]. Recent research has focused more on the linkages between tree demography and organismal function and how species-level functional similarity or dissimilarity dictates the distribution and coexistence of tropical
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.forestry/2012/743617/