Growth Dependence of Tropical Rainforest Tree Species on Resource Availability and Neighbourhood Interactions

Dalui, Dipanjana (2017) Growth Dependence of Tropical Rainforest Tree Species on Resource Availability and Neighbourhood Interactions. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

PDF (MS dissertation of Dipanjana Dalui (12MS012)) 12MS012_Dipanjana_Dalui_Thesis.pdf - Submitted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (3MB)

Abstract

Stem diameter growth rate is an important life historical attribute of tree species.The growth of an individual tree has significant influence on survival and reproduction, and hence on fitness. At the community level studying tree growth rates within and among species is important for understanding biogeochemical cycling of carbon in forest ecosystems, as tree growth is a primary indicator of carbon fixation, predicting changes of species abundances and community composition and therefore long-term forest dynamics, understanding the response of vegetation to logging, fire, and other natural perturbations such as hurricanes that result in elevated tree mortality over short periods of time. Light availability is considered to be one of the most potent environmental drivers of tropical rainforest tree growth. But light availability and individual tree size(diameter) explains only on average 12% of the variation in growth rate among species. Other factors like soil nutrients, and neighbourhood competition need to be included in modelling tree growth in order to examine the variation in growth rate more closely. An hierarchical approach to quantify the response of growth to light availability, tree size across the community, soil nutrient availability, and neighbourhood competition has been used, as it can handle complexity by breaking it up into levels, and has the advantage of addressing differences in sample size between the species. As apart of the project, a multiple linear regression, and a Bayesian regression was also done on the same model to investigate the dependence of growth on available resources and neighbourhood interactions.

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