Form Submission: Participation Entry

Tropical forests are globally defined by their dominant leaf habit, i.e. drought-deciduous or evergreen. Not incidentally, leaf habit is an essential functional characteristic of forests in predictive climate change models. However, such models represent forests as dominated by one strategy or the other, optimizing the link between leaf habit and environment. In reality, widespread coexistence of these two strategies is the norm, not the exception. Coexistence theory, which accounts for the influence of competitive neighborhoods in coexistence, may improve our functional descriptions of forests. In this study, we developed a simple model describing competition between contrasting leaf habits for shared rainfall, and modified it for two coexistence mechanisms: (i) resource partitioning via rainfall seasonality, and (ii) a temporal storage effect generated from interannual rainfall variability. We then assessed model predictions with remote sensing metrics of forest deciduousness and rainfall, finding little evidence for a temporal storage effect.