Data from: Tree demographic strategies largely overlap across succession in Neotropical wet and dry forest communities

Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role in carbon
budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional
trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and
climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the
demographic strategies – combinations of growth, mortality, and
recruitment rates – of the tree species in the community. However, our
understanding of demographic diversity in tropical tree species stems
almost exclusively from old-growth forests. Here, we assembled demographic
information from repeated forest inventories along chronosequences in two
wet (Costa Rica, Panama) and two dry (Mexico) Neotropical forests to
assess whether the ranges of demographic strategies present in a community
shift across succession. We calculated demographic rates for >500
tree species while controlling for canopy status to compare demographic
diversity (i.e. the ranges of demographic strategies) in early
successional (0-30 years), late successional (30-120 years), and
old-growth forests using two-dimensional hypervolumes of pairs of
demographic rates. Ranges of demographic strategies largely overlapped
across successional stages, and early successional stages already covered
the full spectrum of demographic strategies found in old-growth forests.
An exception was a group of species characterized by exceptionally high
mortality rates that were confined to early successional stages in the two
wet forests. The range of demographic strategies did not expand with
succession. Our results suggest that studies of long-term forest
monitoring plots in old-growth forests, from which most of our current
understanding of demographic strategies of tropical tree species is
derived, are surprisingly representative of demographic diversity in
general, but do not replace the need for further studies in secondary
forests.