plant species richness is associated with canopy height and topography in a neotropical forest植物物种丰富度与树冠高度和地形的热带森林.pdfVIP

Remote Sens. 2012, 4, 4010-4021; doi:10.3390/rs4124010 OPEN ACCESS Remote Sensing ISSN 2072-4292 /journal/remotesensing Communication Plant Species Richness is Associated with Canopy Height and Topography in a Neotropical Forest Jeffrey A. Wolf 1,*, Geoffrey A. Fricker 2, Victoria Meyer 3, Stephen P. Hubbell 1,4, 2 3 Thomas W. Gillespie and Sassan S. Saatchi 1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; E-Mail: shubbell@ 2 Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; E-Mails: africker@ (G.A.F.); tg@ (T.W.G.) 3 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Dr., Pasadena, CA 91109, USA; E-Mails: vic.meyer@ (V.M.); sassan.s.saatchi@ (S.S.S.) 4 Center for Tropical Forest Science, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 0843-03092, Balboa, Republic of Panama * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: wolfjeff@; Tel.: +1-310-825-1959; Fax: +1-310-206-3987. Received: 19 October 2012; in revised form: 17 December 2012 / Accepted: 17 December 2012 / Published: 18 December 2012 Abstract: Most plant species are non-randomly distributed across environmental gradients in light, water, and nutrients. In tropical forests, these gradients result from biophysical processes related to the structure of the canopy and terrain, but how does species richness in tropical forests vary over such gradients, and can remote s