Comparison of spatial statistics for identifying underlying process in forest ecology

A number of different mechanisms have been suggested to explain species coexistence in diverse communities such as tropical rainforests. Spatial statistics appear to hold great potential for distinguishing the effects of these in empirical data, and a wide range of measures intended to describe spatial structure have been proposed. Using patterns generated by stochastic individual-based models, we examine the relative sensitivity of several of these measures to processes thought to be occurring in tropical rainforests, and so assess the potential for identifying specific coexistence mechanisms from empirical data. We then apply the measures to spatially explicit census data from a number of large-scale tropical rainforest plots in order to investigate the manifestation of ecological processes in forest spatial structure.