Soils and rainfall drive landscape-scale changes in the diversity and functional composition of tree communities in premontane tropical forest

摘要

Questions: Premontane tropical forests harbour exceptionally high plant species diversity; understanding which factors influence their species composition is critical to conserving them, and to predicting how global environmental change will affect them. We asked: (1) how do a-and beta-diversity vary at the landscape scale; (2) how important is environmental filtering in structuring these communities; and (3) which soil and climate variables account for the most compositional variation?