Neighborhood Effects Explain Increasing Asynchronous Seedling Survival in a Subtropical Forest

In January and February 2008, a subtropical region of China experienced unusual snow and ice storms. Using seedling census data (2006–2014), we investigated the direct and indirect impacts of the 2008 winter storms and temporal climate variability on seedling demography in the Gutianshan 24‐ha subtropical forest dynamics plot. Local neighborhood interactions are highly susceptible to environmental fluctuations and play a stronger role in driving seedling demographic decoupling relative to the pure effects of climate and plant functional traits (43.9% vs. 22.2%), suggesting that divergent species responses to environmental change are driven primarily by indirect effects mediated by changing biotic environments. Photo credit: Yunquan Wang. Photo credit: Lei Chen. These photographs illustrate the article “Neighborhood effects explain increasing asynchronous seedling survival in a subtropical forest” by L. Chen, Y. Q. Wang, X. C. Mi, X .J. Liu, H. B. Ren, J. H. Chen, K. P. Ma, and N. J. B. Kraft, published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2821