Takuo Yamakura

TL;DR: A critical reassessment of the quality and the robustness of these models across tropical forest types, using a large dataset of 2,410 trees ≥ 5 cm diameter, directly harvested in 27 study sites across the tropics, is provided.

TL;DR: The degree of aggregation in the distribution of 1768 tree species is examined based on the average density of conspecific trees in circular neighborhoods around each tree, and it is found that nearly every species was more aggregated than a random distribution.

TL;DR: There are no universal scaling relationships of growth or mortality with size among trees in tropical forests, and a set of alternative predictions were developed that retained some assumptions of metabolic ecology while also considering how availability of a key limiting resource, light, changes with tree size.

TL;DR: Because large-diameter trees constitute roughly half of the mature forest biomass worldwide, their dynamics and sensitivities to environmental change represent potentially large controls on global forest carbon cycling.

TL;DR: The results do not support the hypothesis that fast-growing species are consistently increasing in dominance in tropical tree communities, and suggest that plots may be simultaneously recovering from past disturbances and affected by changes in resource availability.