Atmospheric and soil drought risks combined shape community assembly of trees in a Tropical Dry Forest

1. Predicting plant community assembly is challenging in part because the influence of environmental conditions via plant functional strategies and the relevance of mechanisms of community assembly change across habitats and these changes remain poorly studied. 2. To assess how environmental conditions drive species sorting in a tropical dry forest, we used the combined RLQ and Fourth-Corner methods to analyze changes in tree species assemblages among sites with distinct atmospheric and soil drought risks. We asked how variation in potential radiation, soil water availability and evapotranspiration interact with functional traits to explain the cross-site sorting of species lying along a continuum of drought coping strategies ranging from acquisitive to conservative resource-use. 3. Environment and traits were tightly related. Opposing common expectations on the success of strategies in resource limited environments, drought-tolerant conservative species with dense tissues and tardily d...