title: Dominance of the suppressed: Power-law size structure in tropical forests.
abstract: Tropical tree size distributions are remarkably consistent despite differences in the environments that support them. With data analysis and theory, we found a simple and biologically intuitive hypothesis to explain this property, which is the foundation of forest dynamics modeling and carbon storage estimates. After a disturbance, new individuals in the forest gap grow quickly in full sun until they begin to overtop one another. The two-dimensional space-filling of the growing crowns of the tallest individuals relegates a group of losing, slow-growing individuals to the understory. Those left in the understory follow a power-law size distribution, the scaling of which depends on only the crown area-to-diameter allometry exponent: a well-conserved value across tropical forests.
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA. Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
authors.forename: C E
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Farrior
authors.affiliation: School of Forest Resources and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 0843-03092, Balboa, Ancon, Republic of Panama.
authors.forename: S A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Bohlman
authors.affiliation: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 0843-03092, Balboa, Ancon, Republic of Panama. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hubbell
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
authors.forename: S W
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Pacala
mesh_terms: D002244:Carbon / Q000032:analysis; D065928:Forests; D014197:Trees / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000254:growth & development*
chemical_list: D002244:Carbon