Ecophysiology of Secondary Succession in Tropical Moist Forest: Scaling from Individual Traits to Whole-Plant Performance

Abstract

Secondary forests have probably become the dominant forest type in the tropics and provide many of the same ecosystem function as primary forests. There is thus an urgent need for a further understanding of their ecology and functioning. Yet the mechanisms underlying species replacement during secondary succession in tropical forest are not clearly understood. What traits enable the early successional species to initially achieve dominance and by what means are the later successional species able to initially persist in the vegetation and become dominant later on? We review ecophysiological studies that have addressed this question for tropical moist forests. We discuss that while most research has focused on the trade-off between shade tolerance and other life history traits, a similar tradeoff with respect to water and nutrient availability also plays a role. We also strongly believe that the emphasis of the research should shift from comparing individual traits between different successional groups to the development of quantitative links between these traits and ecological performance measures at the whole-plant level (i.e., growth and survival), and point out that this inevitably entails a need to understand and quantify size related effects on tree functioning.