Identification of characteristic plant co-occurrences in neotropical secondary montane forests

Aims Inferring environmental conditions from characteristic patterns of plant co-occurrences can be crucial for the development of conservation strategiesconcerningsecondaryneotropicalforests.However,nomethodological agreement has been achieved so far regarding the identification and classification of characteristic groups of vascular plant species in the tropics. This study examines botanical and, in particular, statistical aspects to be considered in such analyses. Based on these, we propose a novel data-driven approach for the identification of characteristicplantco-occurrencesinneotropicalsecondarymountainforests. Methods Floristic inventory data were gathered in secondary tropical mountain forests in Ecuador. Vegetation classification was performed by coupling locally adaptive isometric feature mapping, a non-linear ordination method and fuzzy-c-means clustering. This approach was designed for dealing with underlying non-linearities and uncertainties in the inventory data.