Effects of topography on tropical forest structure depend on climate context

1. Topography affects abiotic conditions which can influence the structure, function, and dynamics of ecological communities. An increasing number of studies have demonstrated biological consequences of fine-scale topographic heterogeneity but we have a limited understanding of how these effects depend on the climate context.
2. We merged high-resolution (1 m2) data on topography and canopy height derived from airborne lidar with ground-based data from 15 forest plots in Puerto Rico distributed along a precipitation gradient spanning ca. 800 to 3,500 mm yr-1. Ground-based data included species composition, estimated above-ground biomass (AGB), and two key functional traits (wood density and leaf mass per area, LMA) that reflect resource-use strategies and a trade-off between hydraulic safety and hydraulic efficiency. We used hierarchical Bayesian models to evaluate how the interaction between topography × climate is related to metrics of forest structure (i.e., canopy height and AGB), ...