Woody Plant Species’ Habitat-Association Patterns in the Forest on Barro Colorado Island and the Contributing Roles Played by Biological, Historical, and Random Processes

Spatial patterns of species’ distributions are often biased with respect to environmental variables, including discrete habitats. Patterns alone, however, cannot uniquely identify the combinations of processes that produced them. Many alternative processes could give rise to positive and negative habitat associations, including a population’s history of dispersal limitation and niche-based interactions with the abiotic or biotic environment, possibly owing to habitat specialization. Because of the research infrastructure and detailed species’ distributional and dynamic data provided by the 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot, Barro Colorado Island has been a hub and catalyst for research into pat terns of local-scale habitat associations and their underlying causes. Further research into the mechanisms that generate habitat-association patterns will continue to improve our understanding of tropical community assembly, the origins and maintenance of tropical diversity, and the likely future conditions of tropical plant assemblages.