Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 81
This sun-fi lled commercial teak forest in Sabah's Danum Valley is a dramatically
simplifi ed ecosystem compared to the rainforest that it replaces. Could natural selection even-
tually drive the inhabitants of such a simplifi ed ecosystem to become more different from each
other, restoring something like the diversity of the original forest?
species showed the same pattern, though the statistical signifi cance was less
because the numbers were small.
Thus, the data fi t the expectations of the Janzen-Connell and the N-C
models. There really is frequency-dependent recruitment going on in the
Barro Colorado Island rainforest plot.
I applied this pretend forest method to other forest plots in dif erent parts
of the world, and found the same pattern. One of these was the astoundingly
diverse forest at Lambir in the Sarawak province of northern Borneo, where
there are over 1,400 dif erent species of tree in a half-square kilometer plot.
Others have since replicated these results. For example, H. S. Dattaraja
and his colleagues have extended them to the dry tropical forest at Mudum-
alai that we met at the beginning of this topic, and found the same frequency-
dependent pattern.
