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Changes In A Tropical Forest Support Metabolic Zero-Sum Dynamics, S.K. Morgan Ernest, Ethan P. White, J. H. Brown

Biology Faculty Publications

Major shifts in many ecosystem-level properties of tropical forests have been observed, but the processes driving these changes are poorly understood. Over the past two decades, the forest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama (BCI) exhibited a 20% decrease in the number of trees and a 10% increase in average tree diameter. Here we show that these changes are consistent with a zero-sum constraint operating in this forest. Zero-sum constraints result when the total resource use of an ecosystem is limited by available resources. This causes increases in resource use by some groups of organisms to be compensated for by decreases …