Abstract
Hülsmann and Hartig suggest that ecological mechanisms other than specialized natural enemies or intraspecific competition contribute to our estimates of conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD). To address their concern, we show that our results are not the result of a methodological artifact and present a null-model analysis that demonstrates that our original findings—(i) stronger CNDD at tropical relative to temperate latitudes and (ii) a latitudinal shift in the relationship between CNDD and species abundance—persist even after controlling for other processes that might influence spatial relationships between adults and recruits.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Article number | eaar3824 |
Journal | Science |
Volume | 360 |
Issue number | 6391 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 25 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the distance-weighted approach. We also thank everyone involved in the collection of the vast quantity of data in the CTFS-ForestGEO network; see table S20 in our original paper for site-specific acknowledgments. Supported by NSF grant DEB-1545761 (S.J.D.), NSF grants DEB-1256788 and DEB-1557094 (J.A.M.), NSF grant DEB-1257989 (S.A.M.), and the Tyson Research Center. We declare no conflicts of interest. The data and R code for analyses are available at the Smithsonian Institution’s ForestGEO database portal: https://forestgeo.si.edu/explore-data and https:// forestgeo.si.edu/plant-diversity-increases-strength-negative-density-dependence-global-scale.
Funding Information:
We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the distance-weighted approach. We also thank everyone involved in the collection of the vast quantity of data in the CTFS-ForestGEO network; see table S20 in our original paper for site-specific acknowledgments. Supported by NSF grant DEB-1545761 (S.J.D.), NSF grants DEB-1256788 and DEB-1557094 (J.A.M.), NSF grant DEB-1257989 (S.A.M.), and the Tyson Research Center. We declare no conflicts of interest. The data and R code for analyses are available at the Smithsonian Institution’s ForestGEO database portal: https://forestgeo.si.edu/explore-data and https://forestgeo.si.edu/plant-diversity-increases-strength-negative-density-dependence-global-scale.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Authors.