Lalasia Bialic-Murphy

Editor’s summary Land conversion not only reduces the total habitat available to other species, but it also fragments habitat into smaller and less-connected patches, thus supporting smaller and less-connected populations. Ecologists have developed various metrics capturing different aspects of habitat fragmentation, such as the number and size of habitat patches and their distribution across space. Zou et al.

Editor’s summary The maximum size, growth rate, and lifespan of trees determines the rate of forest carbon accumulation. These life history traits are thought to be correlated, but studies have been limited to local scales in tropical systems. Bialic-Murphy et al. used data on tree size and status from over 1000 species across North, Central, and South America to show that these relationships are more complex.

1 INTRODUCTION Tree communities typically contain a few dominant and relatively many rare tree species, both of which contribute to ecosystem functioning, resilience and services (Dee et al., 2019; McGill et al., 2007). Communities are defined as ‘a group of interacting species populations occurring together in space’ (Roughgarden & Diamond, 1986; Stroud et al., 2015) and it is therefore important to analyse what drives local dominance and rarity, and hence, species composition.