Hebbalalu S. Suresh

TL;DR: There are no universal scaling relationships of growth or mortality with size among trees in tropical forests, and a set of alternative predictions were developed that retained some assumptions of metabolic ecology while also considering how availability of a key limiting resource, light, changes with tree size.

TL;DR: Because large-diameter trees constitute roughly half of the mature forest biomass worldwide, their dynamics and sensitivities to environmental change represent potentially large controls on global forest carbon cycling.

TL;DR: This work focuses on forests, which represent a majority of global biomass, productivity and biodiversity, and investigates the relationship between species richness and ecosystem function as measured by productivity or biomass.

TL;DR: Although demographic differences may foster coexistence, they do not explain any of the 16-fold variation in tree species richness observed across the tropics.

TL;DR: The results do not support the hypothesis that fast-growing species are consistently increasing in dominance in tropical tree communities, and suggest that plots may be simultaneously recovering from past disturbances and affected by changes in resource availability.