Spatial Patterns of Species Distribution Across the Barro Colorado Island 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot

Ecologists have a long history of observing and studying species spatial distribution over a broad range of scales. The establishment of large-scale mapped forest plots in tropical forests, starting with the Barro Colorado Island 50-ha plot, made it possible to study spatial processes that occur at the scales of an individual plant’s neighborhood for thousands of trees and hundreds of species cooccurring in a relatively small area. This unprecedented spatially explicit dataset has stimulated a large body of literature to understand what spatial patterns can tell us about the interactions among species and their environment, and ultimately elucidate the mechanisms that promote high diversity in tropical forests. Here I review some of this large literature, mainly focusing on the connection between patterns and processes.