Declan Cooper
@DeclanLMCooper
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Postdoctoral research fellow at @UCLgeography and @UCLCBER studying quantitative patterns in tropical forest tree communities
London, England
Joined March 2018
RT @Nature: Nature research paper: Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities
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#OpenAccess article here: w/ @SimonLLewis @mjpsullivan @ForestPlots and many many more! Many thanks to all contributors and the local communities who made this work possible!. 14/14.
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🌿🌄Focusing on the common species that dominate these ecosystems provides valuable understanding of the composition of tropical forests, paving the way for simplified characterisation and more effective strategies to ensure their long-term resilience and protection. 13/.
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Practical Implications: Targeted field campaigns to enhance knowledge of identified common species ~ enhanced understanding of most tropical trees. Vegetation models using common species instead of functional traits to better model forest responses to environmental change. 12/.
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🌿🔄Despite substantial inter-continental variations, we have found in the distribution of trees among species an emergent property of the tropical forest system, suggesting that universal mechanisms may govern tree community assembly in all tropical forests!. 11/.
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We identify, via resampling 1,119 species most likely to make up 50% of the world’s moist tropical trees. 🤝🌎Many of the proposed dominant species are well-known locally so collaboration with local tropical forest experts can open avenues to deeper ecological insights. 10/.
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🌿Just 61 of the most common species are expected to account for a tenth of the trees (80 billion individuals). Strikingly the rarest 39,500 species are expected to account for the same amount!. 9/.
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🌳🌴2.24% of species make up 50% of trees, multiplied by 47,000 total estimated species = 1,054 species accounting for 50% of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees!. 8/.
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🌲💫Consistency in common proportions of total species at all levels of dominance means that we can multiply the consistent proportion of common species by the total number of tropical tree species pan-tropically to estimate the total number of common species on Earth!. 7/
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🤔Africa odd-one-out? Many fewer common species in Africa, but also much lower total species = near-identical common proportion of total species in Africa, Amazonia, and Southeast Asia! . E.g. ~2.2% of species comprise 50% of trees in all three regions. 6/.
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Amazonia ~ Southeast Asia: We find striking consistency in patterns of common species and overall species richness in Amazonia and Southeast Asia despite very different regional biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories and divergent geographies. 5/
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📊We used rarefaction to standardize the regional datasets to comparable numbers of trees and bias-corrected log series fits to extrapolate empirical trends to the regional level. 4/.
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🌍 This was a massive collaborative effort with 356 co-authors, combining inventory data on over 1 million trees across 1,568 locations in old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia, and Southeast Asia. 3/
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🌿The vast number of tropical tree species (estimated at 47,000 total!) presents a formidable challenge to understanding tropical forests, as very little is known about the majority of species. We show how a focus on the common species can circumvent this challenge. 2/.
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🌳 Exciting News! 📚 Just published in @Nature, my first first-author paper reveals consistent patterns of common tree species across African, Amazonian, and Southeast Asian tropical forests. @uclnews @UCLgeography @UCLCBER @UniversityLeeds . 1/
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