Forest Ecology and Conservation Group

Changing the Landscape of Conservation

Publications 2000 – 2009

  • Seed mass and the competition /colonization trade-off: competitive interactions and spatial patterns in a guild of annual plants

    Using neighbourhood modelling to estimate individual-level competition coefficients for seven annuals growing in limestone grassland over 2 years the relative strength of intra- and interspecific competition was calculated and related to differences in seed size and plant size between targets and neighbours. TURNBULL, L.A; COOMES, D.A.; HECTOR, A.; REES, M. 2004 PDF

  • Pair-wise competition-trials amongst seedlings of ten dipterocarp species;the role of initial height, growth rate and leaf attributes

    To investigate whether seedlings of ten dipterocarp species differed significantly in terms of growth and mortality or whether species were not significantly different and could be considered ecologically similar. Tanner, E. V. J.; Teo, V.K.; Coomes, D. A.; Midgley, J.J. 2005 PDF

  • On the mechanisms of coexistence among annual-plant species, using neighbourhood techniques and simulation models

    The consequences of competition for the coexistence of plants in annual-plant populations on coastal sand dunes. We used neighbourhood techniques to parameterize competition and dispersal functions from field data collected for two species of dune annual over three successive years. Coomes, D.A.; Rees, M.; Turnbull, L.; Ratcliffe, S. 2002 PDF

  • Long-term influences of introduced deer on the composition and structure of New Zealand Nothofagus forests

    The impacts of two post-irruptive populations of deer to two decades of change in forest composition and canopy species regeneration. Husheer, S.W.; Coomes, D.A.; Robertson, A.W. 2002 PDF

  • IMPACTS OF ROOT COMPETITION IN FORESTS AND WOODLANDS: A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND REVIEW OF EXPERIMENTS

    Predicting the types of forest in which root competition affects seedling performance, and the types of plants that respond most strongly to release from root competition. Testing predictions by reviewing experiments in which tree seedlings and forest herbs are released from belowground competition, usually by cutting trenches to sever the roots of surrounding trees. Coomes,…

  • Herbivory and plant competition reduce mountain beech seedling growth and establishment in New Zealand

    Experimental manipulations on transplanted and naturally occurring mountain beech seedlings to show the effects of deer browsing and competition from deer-induced, herbaceous turf communities. Husheer, S.W.; Robertson, A.W.; Coomes, D.A.; Frampton, C.M. 2005 PDF

  • Factors Preventing the Recovery of New Zealand Forests Following Control of Invasive Deer

    We consider the contributions that scientific research can make to effective forest restoration, including empirically based forest-dynamics models that place regeneration in the context of other processes, such as disturbance, soil fertility, and multiple invasive organisms using the example of Red Deer in New Zealand. Coomes, D.A.;  Allen, R.B.; Forsyth, D.M.; Lee, W.G. 2003 PDF

  • Designing systems to monitor carbon stocks in forests and shrublands

    This paper describes a system for monitoring carbon in New Zealand’s forests and shrublands  6.3 and 2.6 million ha, respectively), which was tested on a 60 km-wide transect across the South Island. Coomes, D.A.;  Allen, R.B.; Scott, N.A.; Goulding, C.; Beets, P. 2002 PDF

  • Disturbances prevent stem size-density distributions in natural forests from following scaling relationships

    Enquist and Niklas propose that trees in natural forests have invariant size-density distributions (SDDs) that scale as a -2 power of stem diameter, although early studies described such distributions using negative exponential functions. Using New Zealand and ‘global’ data sets, we demonstrate that neither type of function accurately describes the SDD over the entire diameter…