Plant Trait-Based Modeling of Forest Succession

Gap dynamics is one of the key drivers of forest succession in temperate forests. The primary successional trajectory involves the transition from early to late successional species, each with distinct trait characteristics. I will present a modeling approach to forest successional dynamics based on scaling plant traits from individual to community levels. In this work, the shade tolerance index is statistically linked with plant traits that characterize early and late successional species using the U.S. Forest Inventory dataset. Discrete and continuous mathematical models, represented by Markov chains and autoregressive models, are employed to predict forest dynamics. An individual-based model is also used to assess the robustness of this scaling approach under different disturbance regimes. Overall, modeling forest successional dynamics based on the scaling of shade tolerance-related functional traits from the individual to the ecosystem level addresses major limitations of models based on the traditional stand age metric.