Essay On Forest Ecology

Forests, which are the dominant terrestrial ecosystem on Earth, play an essential role in the planet’s life support system (Bonan, 2008). Besides providing basic ecological and environmental services, they also supply humanity with valuable goods and services (Pearce, 2001). It is therefore necessary to constantly monitor forest ecosystems in order to comprehend the various processes and factors that determine their ecology, function and patterns. This, in turn, will allow devising proper management strategies to continue satisfying human needs, especially in this era of global environmental change.

It is in this perspective that one of the major goals of forest ecology is the knowledge of the mechanisms that drive life history variation among

This is because there are direct links between traits and the functioning of organisms. Trait distributions constitute therefore an attractive means of looking into how forest communities are associated and how they influence ecosystem processes (Cornwell and Ackerly, 2009). That is why there has been a growing interest in describing the distribution of traits in plant communities and the underlying processes responsible of these distributional patterns such as environmental filtering or niche differentiation (Kraft et al., 2008; Baraloto et al., 2012; Violle et al.,

Similarly, intra-specific trait variation is believed to play an important role in a broad range of ecological processes and properties including resistance to disturbances, competition, coexistence or productivity (Hughes and Stachowicz, 2004; Fridley et al. 2007; Clark et al., 2010; Kotowska et al., 2010). Understanding to which extent species co-existence and plant associations are mediated by intra-specific variability is therefore necessary. This implies knowledge about trait variation distribution mechanisms over ecological and spatial