Growth–survival trade‐off in temperate trees is weak and restricted to late‐successional stages

作者：Kauane Maiara Bordin, D.E. Bauman, Thomas A. M. Pugh, Sandra Cristina Müller, Oliver L. Phillips, Claire Fortunel, Jessica Needham, Christopher W. Woodall, Julen Astigarraga, Juliana Schietti, Daijun Liu, Lalasia Bialic‐Murphy, Adriane Esquivel‐Muelbert · 发表于：Journal of Ecology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1111/1365-2745.70175 · 被引用次数：2 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics、Forest ecology and management

Abstract Life‐history strategies emerge from eco‐evolutionary constraints, where organisms allocate limited resources to growth, survival, and reproduction, resulting in trade‐offs such as the growth–survival trade‐off. There is still a limited understanding of whether and how disturbance regimes and successional stages might mediate such trade‐offs, with potential consequences for species population dynamics and community assembly. Here, we investigate how disturbances shape the growth–survival trade‐off by comparing early and late‐successional forest stands across the eastern United States. Using large‐scale sampling to capture the realised niche of 68 temperate species, we estimated species‐specific mortality probabilities under zero growth (a proxy for resource‐poor environments) applying a Bayesian multilevel modelling framework. We tested trade‐offs between these estimates and species' maximum growth capacity (a proxy for resource‐rich environments), within and across early and late‐successional stands. Overall, we found a weak growth–survival trade‐off among temperate tree species ( R 2 = 0.07). No clear evidence of this trade‐off was found in early successional stands ( R 2 = 0.02), while late‐successional stands showed a relatively stronger—though still weak—positive association between species' maximum growth and mortality under zero growth conditions ( R 2 = 0.17). Disturbances therefore seem to mediate a filtering of tree life‐history strategies. Consequently, an ...