The glocal forest

Abstract

Ecological spatial patterns reflect the underlying processes that shape the structure of species and communities. Mechanisms like inter and intra species competition, dispersal and host-pathogen interactions are believed to act over a wide range of scales, and the inference of the process from the pattern is, despite its popularity, a challenging task. Here we call attention to a quite unexpected phenomenon in the extensively studied tropical forest at the Barro-Colorado Island (BCI): the spatial deployment of (almost) all tree species is statistically equivalent, once distances are normalized by , the typical distance between neighboring conspecific trees. Correlation function, cluster statistics and nearest-neighbor distance distribution become species-independent after this rescaling. Global observables (species frequencies) and local spatial structure appear to be interrelated. This "glocality" suggests a radical interpretation of recent experiments that show a correlation between species' abundance and the negative feedback among conspecifics. For the forest to be glocal, the negative feedback must govern spatial patterns over all scales.