Dataset
The study area is located in the Heishiding Nature Reserve (HSD; 111°52 E, 23°27 N), Guangdong Province, China. Stems with diameters at breath height (DBH) > 1 cm were measured, identified and mapped in a 50 ha plot established in 2013, providing us with the distribution and abundance of 213 tree/shrub species with 213,969 individuals in total (Yin & He, 2014). The HSD plot is one of the sites of the CTFS-Forest Global Earth Observatory, which is a worldwide network dedicated to advancing long-term study of the world’s forests (http://www.ctfs.si.edu;Anderson-Teixeira et al., 2015).
We chose adult trees for analysis in this study because the spatial distributions of adults would better reflect the effect of ecological processes (e.g. dispersal limitation, environmental filtering and biotic interactions) on their growth and survival over time. To obtain a sufficiently large sample size for point pattern analyses, in this study we included 80 common tree species (each with at least 50 individuals with DBH > 10 cm) including a total of 27,453 individuals in 52 genera and 33 families.