By University College London
A major international collaboration of 356 scientists led by UCL researchers has found almost identical patterns of tree diversity across the world's tropical forests.
The study of over one million trees across 1,568 locations, published in Nature, found that just 2.2% of tree species make up 50% of the total number of trees in tropical forests across Africa, the Amazon, and Southeast Asia. Each continent consists of the same proportion of a few common species and many rare species.
While tropical forests are famous for their diversity, this is the first time that scientists have studied the commonest trees in the world's tropical forests.
The scientists estimate that just 1,053 species account for half of the planet's 800 billion tropical forest trees. The other half is comprised of 46,000 tree species. The number of rare species is extreme, with the rarest 39,500 species accounting for just 10% of trees.
Lead author Dr. Declan Cooper (UCL Geography and UCL Center for Biodiversity and Environment Research) said, "Our findings have profound implications for understanding tropical forests. If we focus on understanding the commonest tree species, we can probably predict how the whole forest will respond to today's rapid environmental changes. This is especially important because tropical forests contain a tremendous amount of stored carbon, and are a globally important carbon sink."
He continued, "Identifying the prevalence of the most common species gives scientists a new way of looking at tropical forests. Tracking these common species may provide a new way to characterize these forests and in the future possibly gauge a forest's health more easily."
The researchers found strikingly similar patterns in the proportion of tree species that are common, at close to 2.2%, despite the tropical forests of the Amazon, Africa and Southeast Asia each having a unique history and differing contemporary environments.
