Traits of dominant tree species predict local scale variation in forest aboveground and topsoil carbon stocks

Abstract

Background and Aims Forests play a vital role in regulation of the global carbon cycle. Mechanistically understanding how their ecosystem functioning relates to biodiversity is necessary for predicting the consequences of biodiversity loss and for setting conservation priorities. Here, we test whether carbon stocks in a subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest in China are more strongly influenced by plant functional diversity (FD), as would be predicted by the ‘niche complementarity hypothesis’, or by community-weighted mean (CWM) functional trait values, as would be predicted by the ‘mass ratio hypothesis’.