Light-demanding species; Moist tropical forests; Past human disturbances; Shade-bearer species; Soil charcoal abundance; Soil properties; Tree community assemblages; Wood-specific gravity
Abstract :
[en] Questions: In vast areas of Central African forests, the upper canopy is presently dominated by light-demanding tree species. Here, we confront three hypotheses to explain this dominance: (a) these species have expanded their distribution because of widespread past slash-and-burn activities, as suggested by important charcoal amounts recorded in the soils of the region; (b) their abundance is rather explained by soil properties, as this guild establishes preferentially on favourable physico-chemical conditions for rapid growth; (c) soil properties have been substantially influenced by past human disturbances and those two effects cannot be disentangled.
Location: Pallisco-CIFM logging concession, southeastern Cameroon (300,000 ha).
Methods: We quantified soil charcoal abundance and measured ten soil variables at the basis of 60 target trees that belonged to a list of three long-living pioneer lightdemanding (LLP) and four shade-bearer (SB) species. We identified all stems with a diameter at breast height (DBH) ≥ 20 cm within a distance of 15 m around each target tree. Species were characterised by their wood-specific gravity (WSG), which reflected their light requirement. Multiple regression models were used to quantify and test the relative effects of charcoal abundance and soil variables on the mean WSG of the 60 tree communities, as well as the abundance of three guilds: LLP, SB, and non-pioneer light demanders (NPLD).
Results: The mean WSG was the only response variable significantly explained by soil variables and charcoal abundance combined. It was significantly negatively associated with soil calcium and Mg content and with charcoal abundance, with soil and charcoal influencing the mean WSG independently.
Conclusion: Our study provides evidence that past human disturbances and soil fertility have independently promoted the establishment of light-demanding species in western Central African forests, thereby shedding light on tree community assembly rules in these ecosystems which remain considerably understudied compared to the tropical forests of other continents.
scite shows how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation, a classification describing whether it supports, mentions, or contrasts the cited claim, and a label indicating in which section the citation was made.
Bibliography
Ashton, P. S., & Hall, P. (1992). Comparisons of structure among mixed dipterocarp forests of north-western Borneo. Journal of Ecology, 80, 459–481. https://doi.org/10.2307/2260691
Baldeck, C. A., Tupayachi, R., Sinca, F., Jaramillo, N., & Asner, G. P. (2016). Environmental drivers of tree community turnover in western Amazonian forests. Ecography, 39, 1089–1099. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.01575
Bauman, D., Drouet, T., Dray, S., & Vleminckx, J. (2018b). Disentangling good from bad practices in the selection of spatial or phylogenetic eigenvectors. Ecography, 41, 1638–1649. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.03380
Bauman, D., Drouet, T., Fortin, M.-J., & Dray, S. (2018a). Optimising the choice of a spatial weighting matrix in eigenvector-based methods. Ecology, 99(10), 2159–2166.
Bauman, D., Vleminckx, J., Hardy, O., & Drouet, T. (2019). Testing and interpreting the shared space-environment fraction in variation partitioning analyses of ecological data. Oikos, 128, 274–285. https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.05496
Bénédet, F., Doucet, J.-L., Fayolle, A., Gourlet-Fleury, S., & Vincke, D. (2013). CoForTraits, base de données d'information sur les traits des espèces d'arbres africaines. Version 1.0. Access to database can be granted upon request to cofortraits@cirad.fr.
Biwolé, A. B., Morin-Rivat, J., Fayolle, A., Bitondo, D., Dedry, L., Dainou, K., … Doucet, J.-L. (2015). New data on the recent history of the littoral forests of southern Cameroon: An insight into the role of historical human disturbances on the current forest composition. Plant Ecology and Evolution, 148(1), 19–28. https://doi.org/10.5091/plecevo.2015.1011
Blanchet, F. G., Legendre, P., & Borcard, D. (2008). Forward selection of explanatory variables. Ecology, 89, 2623–2632.
Bourland, N., Cerisier, F., Daïnou, K., Smith, A., Hubau, W., Beeckman, H., … Doucet, J.-L. (2015). How tightly linked are Pericopsis elata (Fabaceae) patches to anthropogenic disturbances in Southeastern Cameroon? Forests, 6, 293–310. https://doi.org/10.3390/f6020293
Brncic, T. M., Willis, K. J., Harris, D. J., & Washington, R. (2007). Culture or climate? The relative influences of past processes on the composition of the lowland Congo rainforest. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1478), 229–242.
Chave, J., Muller-Landau, H. C., Baker, T. R., Easdale, T., ter Steege, H., & Webb, C. O. (2006). Regional and phylogenetic variation of wood density across 2456 Neotropical tree species. Ecological Applications, 16, 2356–2367. https://doi.org/10.1890/1051-0761(2006)016[2356:RAPVOW]2.0.CO;2
Clist, B. (2005). Des premiers villages aux premiers Européens autour de l'estuaire du Gabon: Quatre millénaires d'interactions entre l'homme et son milieu (p 938). PhD thesis, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.
Comita, L. S., Queenborough, S. A., Murphy, S. J., Eck, J. L., Xu, K., Krishnadas, M., … Zhu, Y. (2014). Testing predictions of the Janzen-Connell hypothesis: A meta-analysis of experimental evidence for distance- and density-dependent seed and seedling survival. Journal of Ecology, 102, 845–856. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.12232
Condit, R., Engelbrecht, B. M. J., Pino, D., Perez, R., & Turner, B. L. (2013). Species distributions in response to individual soil nutrients and seasonal drought across a community of tropical trees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110, 5064–5068. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1218042110
Da Costa, M. L., & Kern, D. C. (1999). Geochemical signatures of tropical soils with archaeological black earth in the Amazon. Journal of Geochemical Exploration, 66(1/2), 369–385.
Denham, T. P., Haberle, S. G., Lentfer, C., Fullagar, R., Field, J., Therin, M., … Winsborough, B. (2003). Origins of agriculture at kuk swamp in the highlands of new guinea. Science, 301, 189–193. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1085255
Doucet, J.-L. (2003). L'alliance délicate de la gestion forestière et de la biodiversité dans les forêts du centre du Gabon. PhD thesis, Faculté Universitaire des Gembloux.
Dray, S., Legendre, P., & Peres-Neto, P. R. (2006). Spatial modelling: A comprehensive framework for principal coordinate analysis of neighbour matrices (PCNM). Ecological Modelling, 196, 483–493. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2006.02.015
Fayolle, A., Engelbrecht, B., Freycon, V., Mortier, F., Swaine, M., Réjou-Méchain, M., … Gourlet-Fleury, S. (2012). Geological substrates shape tree species and trait distributions in African moist forests. PLoS ONE, 7(8), e42381. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042381
Fayolle, A., Loubota Panzou, G. J., Drouet, T., Swaine, M. D., Bauwens, S., Vleminckx, J., … Doucet, J.-L. (2016). Taller trees, denser stands and greater biomass in semi-deciduous than in evergreen lowland central African forests. Forest Ecology and Management, 374, 42–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2016.04.033
Fayolle, A., Picard, N., Doucet, J.-L., Swaine, M., Bayol, N., Bénédet, F., … Gourlet-Fleury, S. (2014). A new insight in the structure, composition and functioning of central African moist forests. Forest Ecology and Management, 329, 195–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2014.06.014
Freckleton, R. P. (2011). Dealing with collinearity in behavioural and ecological data: Model averaging and the problems of measurement error. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 65(1), 91–101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-010-1045-6
Glaser, B., & Birk, J. J. (2012). State of the scientific knowledge on properties and genesis of Anthropogenic Dark Earths in Central Amazonia (terra preta de Indio). Geochimica Et Cosmochimica Acta, 82, 39–51.
Hardy, O. J., & Senterre, B. (2007). Characterizing the phylogenetic structure of communities by an additive partitioning of phylogenetic diversity. Journal of Ecology, 95, 493–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2745.2007.01222.x
Hawthorne, W. D. (1995).Ecological profiles of Ghanaian forest trees. Tropical Forestry Papers No. 29.(p 345).
Hubau, W. D. (2013). Exploring charcoal as a natural archive for palaeofire and vegetation history of the Mayumbe, Democratic Republic of the Congo. PhD thesis, Ghent University.
Hubbell, S. P. (2001). The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography (p. 375). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Iglesias-Martínez, M., Espí, J. A., & Edou-Minko, A. (2018). Geological setting of gold mineralisation of the Minvoul greenstone belt (Ntem complex, northern Gabon). Journal of African Earth Sciences, 147, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jafrearsci.2018.06.011
IUSS Working Group WRB (2015). World reference base for soil resources 2014 – International soil classification system for naming soils and creating legends for soil maps. Update 2015. World Soil Resources Reports No. 106. FAO, Rome.
John, R., Dalling, J. W., Harms, K. E., Yavitt, J. B., Stallard, R. F., Mirabello, M., … Foster, R. B. (2007). Soil nutrients influence spatial distributions of tropical tree species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(3), 864–869. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0604666104
Jones, A., Breuning-Madsen, H., Brossard, M., Dampha, A., Deckers, J., Dewitte, O., & Zougmoré, R. (Eds.) (2013). Soil Atlas of Africa (p.176). Luxembourg: European Commission, Publications Office of the European Union.
Kealhofer, L. (2003). Looking into the gap: Land use and the tropical forests of Southern Thailand. Asian Perspectives, 42(1), 72–95. https://doi.org/10.1353/asi.2003.0022
King, D. A., Davies, S. J., Supardi, M. N. N., & Tan, S. (2005). Tree growth is related to light interception and wood density in two mixed dipterocarp forests of Malaysia. Functional Ecology, 19, 445–453. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2005.00982.x
Lawrence, D. (2003). The response of tropical tree seedlings to nutrient supply: Meta-analysis for understanding a changing tropical landscape. Journal of Tropical Ecology, 19, 239–250. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266467403003274
Lehmann, J., Kern, D. C., Glaser, B., & Woods, W. I. (2003). Amazonian dark earths: Origin, properties and management (p. 523). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
Ligot, G., Fayolle, A., Gourlet-Fleury, S., Dainou, K., Gillet, J.-F., De Ridder, M., … Doucet, J.-L. (2019). Growth determinants of timber species Triplochiton scleroxylon and implications for forest management in central Africa. Forest Ecology and Management, 437, 211–221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2019.01.042
Lima, H. N., Schaefer, C. E. R., Mello, J. W. V., Gilkes, R. J., & Ker, J. C. (2002). Pedogenesis and pre-Colombian land use of Terra Preta Anthrosols (Indian black earth) of Western Amazonia. Geoderma, 110, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-7061(02)00141-6
Maire, V., Gross, N., Börger, L., Proulx, R., Wirth, C., Pontes, L. D. S., … Louault, F. (2012). Habitat filtering and niche differentiation jointly explain species relative abundance within grassland communities along fertility and disturbance gradients. New Phytologist, 196, 497–509. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2012.04287.x
Meunier, Q., Moumbogou, C., & Doucet, J.-L. (2015). Les arbres utiles du Gabon (p. 340). Gembloux, Belgium: Presses Agronomiques de Gembloux.
Morin-Rivat, J., Biwolé, A., Gorel, A.-P., Vleminckx, J., Gillet, J.-F., Bourland, N., … Doucet, J.-L. (2016). High spatial resolution of late-Holocene human activities in the moist forests of central Africa using soil charcoal and charred botanical remains. The Holocene, 26(12), 1954–1967. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683616646184
Morin-Rivat, J., Fayolle, A., Favier, C., Bremond, L., Gourlet-Fleury, S., Bayol, N., … Doucet, J.-L. (2017). Present-day central African forest is a legacy of the 19th century human history. Elife, 6, e20343. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20343
Muledi, J. I., Bauman, D., Drouet, T., Vleminckx, J., Jacobs, A., Lejoly, J., … Shutcha, M. N. (2017). Fine-scale habitats influence tree species assemblage in a miombo forest. Journal of Plant Ecology, 10(6), 958–969.
Odonne, G., Bel, M., Burst, M., Brunaux, O., Bruno, M., Dambrine, E., … Hérault, B. (2019). Long-term influence of early human occupations on current forests of the Guiana Shield. Ecology, 100(10), e02806. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2806
O'Hara, R. B., & Kotze, D. J. (2010). Do not log-transform count data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 1, 118–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00021.x
Oslisly, R., White, L., Bentaleb, I., Favier, C., Fontugne, M., Gillet, J. F., & Sebag, D. (2013). Climatic and cultural changes in the west Congo Basin forests over the past 5000 years. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 368(1625), 20120304. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0304
Ouédraogo, D.-Y., Fayolle, A., Gourlet-Fleury, S., Mortier, F., Freycon, V., Fauvet, N., … Favier, C. (2016). The determinants of tropical forest deciduousness: Disentangling the effects of rainfall and geology in central Africa. Journal of Ecology, 104, 924–935. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.12589
Pansu, M., & Gautheyrou, J. (2006). Handbook of soil analysis: Mineralogical, organic and inorganic methods (p. 969). Berlin, Germany: Springer.
Plourde, B. T., Boukili, V. K., & Chazdon, R. L. (2015). Radial changes in wood specific gravity of tropical trees: Interand intraspecific variation during secondary succession. Anten N, editor. Functional Ecology, 29, 111–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.12305
Nature+ & Pallisco (2012). Evaluation de l'état des populations des essences exploitées par la société Pallisco et des décisions prises en matière d'aménagement. Gembloux, Belgium: Laboratoire de Foresterie des Régions tropicales et subtropicales - ULg Gx ABT. http://hdl.handle.net/2268/168054
Poorter, L., Bongers, L., & Bongers, F. (2006). Architecture of 54 moist-forest tree species: Traits, trade-offs, and functional groups. Ecology, 87, 1289–1301. https://doi.org/10.1890/0012-9658(2006)87[1289:AOMTST]2.0.CO;2
Poorter, L., Wright, S. J., Paz, H., Ackerly, D. D., Condit, R., Ibarra-Manríquez, G., … Wright, I. J. (2008). Are functional traits good predictors of demographic rates? Evidence from five neotropical forests. Ecology, 89, 1908–1920. https://doi.org/10.1890/07-0207.1
Quesada, C. A., Phillips, O. L., Schwarz, M., Czimczik, C. I., Baker, T. R., Patiño, S., … Lloyd, J. (2012). Basin-wide variations in Amazon forest structure and function are mediated by both soils and climate. Biogeosciences, 9, 2203–2246. https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-9-2203-2012
Quintero-Vallejo, E., Klomberg, Y., Bongers, F., Poorter, L., Toledo, M., & Peña-Claros, M. (2015). Amazonian dark earth shapes the understory plant community in a Bolivian forest. Biotropica, 47(2), 152–161. https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.12193
R Development Core Team. (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing, version 3. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org
Rogerson, P. A. (2001). Statistical methods for geography. London: Sage.
Rollet, B. (1983). La régénération naturelle dans les trouées. Bois Et Forêts Des Tropiques, 202, 19–33.
Russo, S. E., Davies, S. J., King, D. A., & Tan, S. (2005). Soil-related performance variation and distributions of tree species in a Bornean Rain Forest. Journal of Ecology, 93, 879–889. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2745.2005.01030.x
Schrodt, F., Kattge, J., Shan, H., Fazayeli, F., Joswig, J., Banerjee, A., … Reich, P. B. (2015). BHPMF - a hierarchical Bayesian approach to gap-filling and trait prediction for macroecology and functional biogeography. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 24, 1510–1521. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12335
Senterre, B. (2005). Recherches méthodologiques pour la typologie de la végétation et la Phytogéographie des forêts denses d'Afrique Tropicale (p. 343). PhD dissertation. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, BE.
Slik, J. W. F. (2006). Estimating species-specific wood density from the genus average in Indonesian trees. Journal of Tropical Ecology, 22, 481–482. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266467406003324
Swaine, M. D., & Hall, J. B. (1988). The mosaic theory of forest regeneration and the determination of forest composition in Ghana. Journal of Tropical Ecology, 4, 253–269. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266467400002819
Toteu, S. F., Van Schmus, W. R., Penaye, J., & Michard, A. (2001). New U-Pb and Sm–Nd data from north-central Cameroon and its bearing on the pre-Pan African history of central Africa. Precambrian Research, 108, 45–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0301-9268(00)00149-2
Van Gemerden, B. S., Olff, H., Parren, M. P. E., & Bongers, F. (2003). The pristine rain forest? Remnants of historical Human impacts on current tree species composition and diversity. Journal of Biogeography, 30, 1381–1390. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2699.2003.00937.x
Vitousek, P. M. (2004). Nutrient Cycling and Limitation: Hawai'i as a Model System. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
Vleminckx, J., Doucet, J.-L., Morin-Rivat, J., Biwolé, A. B., Bauman, D., Hardy, O. J., … Drouet, T. (2017). The influence of spatially structured soil properties on tree community assemblages at a landscape scale in the tropical forests of southern Cameroon. Journal of Ecology, 105, 354–366. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.12707
Vleminckx, J., Morin-Rivat, J., Biwolé, A. B., Daïnou, K., Gillet, J.-F., Doucet, J.-L., … Hardy, O. J. (2014). Soil charcoal to assess the impacts of past Human disturbances on tropical forests. PLoS ONE, 9(11), e108–121. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0108121
Vleminckx, J., Salazar, D., Fortunel, C., Mesones, I., Dávila, N., Lokvam, J., … Fine, P. V. A. (2018). Divergent secondary metabolites and habitat filtering both contribute to tree species coexistence in the Peruvian Amazon. Frontiers in Plant Science, 9, 836. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2018.00836
Wagner, H. H., & Dray, S. (2015). Generating spatially constrained null models for irregularly spaced data using Moran spectral randomization methods. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 6, 1169–1178. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12407
Willis, K. J., Gillson, L., & Brncic, T. M. (2004). How “virgin” is virgin rainforest? Science, 304, 402–403.
Wright, S. J., Kitajima, K., Kraft, N. J. B., Reich, P. B., Wright, I. J., Bunker, D. E., … Zanne, A. E. (2010). Functional traits and the growth-mortality trade-off in tropical trees. Ecology, 91, 3664–3674. https://doi.org/10.1890/09-2335.1
Zanne, A. E., Lopez-Gonzalez, G., Coomes, D. A., Ilic, J., Jansen, S., Lewis, S. L., … Chave, J. (2009). Global wood density database. Dryad. http://hdl.handle.net/10255/dryad.235
Similar publications
Sorry the service is unavailable at the moment. Please try again later.
This website uses cookies to improve user experience. Read more
Save & Close
Accept all
Decline all
Show detailsHide details
Cookie declaration
About cookies
Strictly necessary
Performance
Strictly necessary cookies allow core website functionality such as user login and account management. The website cannot be used properly without strictly necessary cookies.
This cookie is used by Cookie-Script.com service to remember visitor cookie consent preferences. It is necessary for Cookie-Script.com cookie banner to work properly.
Performance cookies are used to see how visitors use the website, eg. analytics cookies. Those cookies cannot be used to directly identify a certain visitor.
Used to store the attribution information, the referrer initially used to visit the website
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. Websites use cookies to help users navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. Cookies that are required for the website to operate properly are allowed to be set without your permission. All other cookies need to be approved before they can be set in the browser.
You can change your consent to cookie usage at any time on our Privacy Policy page.
