Population characteristics of the 20 most abundant tree species of the Amazon

Range Table - link
Organism Biosphere
Reference ter Steege H et al. Hyperdominance in the Amazonian tree flora. Science. 2013 Oct 18 342(6156):1243092. doi: 10.1126/science.1243092. p.1243092-4 table 1PubMed ID24136971
Method P.325 2nd paragraph: "The ~6-million-km^2 Amazonian lowlands were divided into 1° cells, and mean tree density was estimated for each cell by using a loess regression model that included no environmental data but had its basis exclusively in the geographic location of tree plots. A similar model, allied with a bootstrapping exercise to quantify sampling error, was used to generate estimated Amazon-wide abundances of the 4962 valid species in the data set. [Investigators] estimated the total number of tree species in the Amazon by fitting the mean rank-abundance data to Fisher’s log-series distribution."
Comments P.1243092-1 right column 4th paragraph: "Second, the RAD [rank-abundance distribution] suggests that just 227 (1.4%) of the estimated 16,000 species account for half of all individual trees in Amazonia. [Investigators] refer to these species, all of which have estimated populations of >3.7×10^8 trees, as hyperdominant species (see a list of the 20 most abundant species in Table 1 and a full list in appendix S1). These hyperdominant species form the basis of the tree communities in individual plots as well, accounting for a median of 41% of trees (range = 0 to 94%, fig. S9) and 32% of species (range = 0 to 78%) per plot (fig. S9)." P.2 left column bottom paragraph: "Fourth, there are strong similarities between theoretical models of tree species richness in the Amazon (ref 1) and [investigators'] distribution of species abundances based on empirical data. For example, Hubbell et al. (ref 1) used a log-series distribution to predict that the most common species in the Amazon should account for 1.39% of all trees. This is very close to [their] estimate for the most common species in [their] data set, the palm Euterpe precatoria (1.32%)." See note above table
Entered by Uri M
ID 112913