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Do disturbance and productivity influence evenness of seedling, sapling and adult tree species across a semi‐deciduous tropical forest landscape?
Author(s) -
Larpkern Panadda,
Totland Ørjan,
Moe Stein R.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
oikos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.672
H-Index - 179
eISSN - 1600-0706
pISSN - 0030-1299
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0706.2010.18967.x
Subject(s) - species evenness , productivity , deciduous , disturbance (geology) , ecology , biology , diameter at breast height , species diversity , paleontology , macroeconomics , economics
Disturbance and productivity may influence and alter community structure by affecting the partitioning of resources among species. Here, we examined how evenness in the relative abundance of growth stages (seedlings, saplings and adults) of woody species is related to measures of productivity (i.e. total diameter breast high (dbh) and tree volume) and aspects of human disturbance (i.e. number of tree stumps, area covered by charcoal making holes and trail length) in a bamboo‐deciduous forest, northeastern of Thailand. Our results using stepwise multiple regressions showed that productivity (total dbh) explained a significant part of the variation in evenness only at the adult stage where evenness decreased with productivity. We found a decreased evenness of saplings with the area covered by charcoal making holes. Evenness of seedlings was not related to productivity or human disturbance variables and other environmental variables contribute more to explain the variation in evenness at this stage. Evenness was correlated consistently between the growth stages but the strength of relationships diminishes across the stages. Our results suggest that high productivity and human disturbance may facilitate competitive dominant species, affecting evenness in woody communities.