Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role in carbon budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the demographic strategies—combinations of growth, mortality and recruitment rates—of the tree species in the community. However, our understanding of demographic diversity in tropical tree species stems almost exclusively from old‐growth forests. Here, we assembled demographic information from repeated forest inventories along chronosequences in two wet (Costa Rica, Panama) and two dry (Mexico) Neotropical forests to assess whether the ranges of demographic strategies present in a community shift across succession. We calculated demographic rates for >500 tree species while controlling for canopy status to compare demographic diversity (i.e., the ranges of demographic strategies) in early successional (0–30 years), late successional (30–120 years) and old‐growth forests using two‐dimensional hypervolumes of pairs of demographic rates. Ranges of demographic strategies largely overlapped across successional stages, and early successional stages already covered the full spectrum of demographic strategies found in old‐growth forests. An exception was a group of species characterized by exceptionally high mortality rates that was confined to early successional stages in the two wet forests. The range of demographic strategies did not expand with succession. Our results suggest that studies of long‐term forest monitoring plots in old‐growth forests, from which most of our current understanding of demographic strategies of tropical tree species is derived, are surprisingly representative of demographic diversity in general, but do not replace the need for further studies in secondary forests.

中文翻译：

---

新热带湿润和干燥森林群落的树木种群统计策略在演替过程中很大程度上重叠


热带次生林在碳预算和生物多样性保护中发挥着越来越重要的作用。因此，了解演替轨迹对于指导森林恢复和减缓气候变化工作至关重要。森林演替是由群落中树种的人口统计策略（生长、死亡率和补充率的组合）驱动的。然而，我们对热带树种种群多样性的理解几乎完全来自古老的森林。在这里，我们根据两个潮湿（哥斯达黎加、巴拿马）和两个干燥（墨西哥）新热带森林的时间序列重复森林清查收集了人口统计信息，以评估群落中存在的人口统计策略范围是否会随着演替发生变化。我们计算了超过 500 种树种的人口统计率，同时控制了树冠状况，以比较早期演替（0-30 年）、晚期演替（30-120 年）和古老森林的人口多样性（即人口统计策略的范围）使用人口比率对的二维超体积。人口策略的范围在演替阶段很大程度上重叠，早期演替阶段已经涵盖了原始森林中发现的全部人口策略。一个例外是一群死亡率极高的物种，这些物种仅限于两片潮湿森林的早期演替阶段。人口战略的范围并没有随着时间的推移而扩大。 我们的结果表明，对古老森林的长期森林监测图的研究，我们目前对热带树种人口统计策略的大部分理解都是从中得出的，令人惊讶地代表了总体人口多样性，但并不能取代需要以便进一步研究次生林。