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Organized Oral Session

Session: Life in the changing forest canopy: Ecology, function, and conservation

OOS 47-3 - Structural diversity as a reliable and novel predictor for ecosystem productivity across North America

Thursday, August 18, 2022

4:00 PM – 4:15 PM EDT

Location: 520C

Presenting Author(s)

EL

Elizabeth LaRue

Assistant Professor
The University of Texas at El Paso, United States

Co-author(s)

JK

Jonathan Knott

US Forest Service
GD

Grank M. Domke

Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, United States
HC

Han Chen

Lakehead university, Canada
QG

Qinfeng Guo

USDA Forest Service, United States
MH

Masumi Hisano

Lakehead University
CO

Christopher Oswalt

US Forest Service
SO

Sonja Oswalt

US Forest Service
NK

Nicole Kong

Purdue University
KP

Kevin M. Potter

NC State University / USDA Forest Service
Research Triangle Park, NC, United States
SF

Songlin Fei

Purdue University, United States

Background/Question/Methods

Ecosystems provide services essential for human survival, but for ecosystems to function well, they are thought to need sufficient ecological diversity. The physical structure of vegetation is thought to be closely linked to the functioning of ecosystems. We used data from over 3 million trees that covered continental North America to evaluate structural diversity – the physical arrangement of vegetation in ecosystems – as a predictor of the productivity of forest ecosystems.

Results/Conclusions

We show that structural diversity is a robust predictor of forest productivity and consistently outperforms the traditional measure, species diversity, across climate conditions in North America. Structural diversity appears to be a better surrogate of niche occupancy because it captures variation in size that can be used to measure occupied niche space. Structural diversity is easy to measure and has high potential to be expanded to predict the productivity of ecosystems worldwide. Conservation and management could improve practices for enhancing ecosystem services by generally incorporating structural diversity into them.