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AOBPreview published online on March 30, 2006
Annals of Botany, doi:10.1093/aob/mcl067
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Received November 10, 2005
Revised January 10, 2006
Accepted February 10, 2006

Article

Neither Host-specific nor Random: Vascular Epiphytes on Three Tree Species in a Panamanian Lowland Forest

STEFAN LAUBE 1 * and GERHARD ZOTZ 2

1 Fachbereich Biologie, Abt. Pflanzenökologie und Systematik 13/274, D-67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany
2 Botanisches Institut der Universität Basel, Schönbeinstrasse 6, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado Postal 0843-03092, Balboa, Ancon, Panama

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
STEFAN LAUBE, E-mail: s.laube{at}web.de


  Abstract

• Background and Aims A possible role of host tree identity in the structuring of vascular epiphyte communities has attracted scientific attention for decades. Specifically, it has been suggested that each host tree species has a specific subset of the local species pool according to its own set of properties, e.g. physicochemical characteristics of the bark, tree architecture, or leaf phenology patterns.

• Methods A novel, quantitative approach to this question is presented, taking advantage of a complete census of the vascular epiphyte community in 0·4 ha of undisturbed lowland forest in Panama. For three locally common host-tree species (Socratea exorrhiza, Marila laxiflora, Perebea xanthochyma) null models were created of the expected epiphyte assemblages assuming that epiphyte colonization reflected random distribution of epiphytes in the forest.

• Key Results In all three tree species, abundances of the majority of epiphyte species (69-81 %) were indistinguishable from random, while the remaining species were about equally over- or under-represented compared with their occurrence in the entire forest plot. Permutations based on the number of colonized trees (reflecting observed spatial patchiness) yielded similar results. Finally, a third analysis (canonical correspondence analysis) also confirmed host-specific differences in epiphyte assemblages. In spite of pronounced preferences of some epiphytes for particular host trees, no epiphyte species was restricted to a single host.

• Conclusions The epiphytes on a given tree species are not simply a random sample of the local species pool, but there are no indications of host specificity either.

Keywords: Epiphytes, community assembly, null model, host preference, colonization, Panama, Orchidaceae, Bromeliaceae, Araceae.
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