Hao Ran Lai

South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership

Understanding how functional traits moderate species’ demographic responses along environmental gradients is a core pursuit in ecology, often to predict how species abundances will respond to a rapidly changing environment. The latter necessitates species demography, or at least abundance, to be modelled directly as a response; yet, most studies ti...

Identifying generalisable processes that underpin population dynamics is crucial for understanding successional patterns. While longitudinal or chronosequence data are powerful tools for doing so, the traditional focus on community-level shifts in taxonomic and functional composition rather than species-level trait–demography relationships has made...

Growth in individual size or biomass is a key demographic component in population models, with wide‐ranging applications from quantifying species performance across abiotic or biotic conditions to assessing landscape‐level dynamics under global change. In forest ecology, the responses of tree growth to biotic interactions are widely held to be cruc...

Despite the development of network science, we lack clear heuristics for how far different disturbance types propagate within and across species interaction networks. We discuss the mechanisms of disturbance propagation in ecological networks, and propose that disturbances can be categorized into structural, functional, and transmission types accor...

Interactions between and within abiotic and biotic processes generate nonadditive density-dependent effects on species performance that can vary in strength or direction across environments. If ignored, nonadditivities can lead to inaccurate predictions of species responses to environmental and compositional changes. While there are increasing empi...

In rivers, we are seeing a shift away from natural flow regimes towards larger and more frequent extreme drought and flood events. However, it is unclear how increasing intensity and frequency of extreme flow disturbances will play out alongside existing biotic pressures, such as biological invasions, to impact aquatic biodiversity. In New Zealand,...

Predicting how nature's contributions to people (NCP) vary spatially remains a challenge. For NCP provided by mobile species, it is unclear how predictions need to account for the influence of multiple habitat types that act as sources, sinks and potential distractors of the NCP‐providing species. Existing approaches that do not account for these e...

There is currently a dichotomy in the modelling of Grinnellian vs. Eltonian niches. Despite similar underlying data, Grinnellian niches are commonly modelled with species-distribution models (SDMs), Eltonian niches are modelled with ecological-network analysis. This separation stems from the much sparser data on species interactions, which has prev...

Trees are important ecosystem service providers that improve the physical environment and human experience in cities throughout the world. Since the ecosystem services and maintenance requirements of urban trees change as they grow in time, predictive models of tree growth rates are useful to forecast societal benefits and maintenance costs over a...

Naturally regenerating secondary vegetation dominates the tropical forest landscapes, showing a remarkable capacity to sequester carbon, but such a role is threatened by increasing drought predicted with climate change. To understand how secondary forest species and communities respond to drought, we leverage a long-term chronosequence of tropical...

Plant phenology directly drives population dynamics and forest productivity; it is also impacted by shifting environmental cues under climate change such as more prevalent drought. It is imperative to better understand how species and community phenology respond to climate change in leaf turnover and reproduction, both of which are required to inte...

Understanding how past climate has filtered different tree strategies into communities is crucial for predicting how future climates will impact species and communities, yet few studies have used physiologically interpretable traits to explain the assembly of entire tree communities across large, continuous climatic gradients. To address this gap,...

1. Species performance in the realised niche is jointly shaped by both abiotic and biotic processes. Moreover, interactions between and within abiotic and biotic processes generate non-additivities, resulting in density dependence that varies in strength or even direction across environments. If ignored, these non-additivities can lead to inaccurat...

Forest disturbances caused by extreme weather events such as severe windstorms are expected to become more prevalent under global climate change. It is imperative that we understand how plant species respond to disturbance- induced habitat changes to be able to predict if forest communities recover from catastrophic events. However, the impacts of...

Functional traits offer generalizability to the prediction of ecosystem processes such as production, and community-weighted mean trait values are increasingly used for such predictions. However, the underlying causal direction between traits and ecosystem processes are often indirect and sometimes even tenuous. In this study, we aimed to uncover u...

Context Tropical forest loss has a major impact on climate change. Secondary forest growth has potential to mitigate these impacts, but uncertainty regarding future land use, remote sensing limitations, and carbon model accuracy have inhibited understanding the range of potential future carbon dynamics. Objectives We evaluated the effects of four...

The realised niche is jointly shaped by both abiotic and biotic processes. Moreover, the strength and direction of biotic interactions may vary across abiotic conditions and generate non-additivities that, if ignored, could lead to inaccurate predictions of species responses to changes in environment and composition. We tested this idea by analysin...

We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of values of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 448 traits across 28,640 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxon descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of per...

Growth in individual size or biomass is a key demographic component in population models, with wide-ranging applications from quantifying species performance across abiotic or biotic conditions to assessing landscape-level dynamics under global change. In forest ecology, the responses of tree growth to biotic interactions are widely held to be cruc...

Questions How (de)coupled are native and exotic tree diversities in their relationships with local soil conditions and landscape configurations? Can (de)coupled diversity–environment relationships be used to manage native and exotic species separately to minimize unintended impacts on one another? Location The tropical city‐state of Singapore, So...

We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of measurements of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 375 traits across 29230 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxa descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of...

Trees are important components of urban greenery because of their large stature and longevity, and their ability to enhance the environmental quality of city landscapes. However, benefits and hazards associated with trees depend on their size, which changes over time and varies among species. While urban trees are often measured during routine mana...

Elevated levels of airborne particulate matter (PM) pose health risks to populations living in many cities worldwide. To remediate the impact of air pollution, urban greening has been increasingly explored as a possible way to remove PM from the surroundings. However, existing research focuses mainly on species-specific assessments within temperate...

Questions How do abiotic conditions, forest structure, as well as taxonomic and functional diversities and composition recover after wind‐generated treefalls? Do young and old‐growth secondary forests differ in their responses? Location Mandai region of the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, Singapore, where extensive treefalls occurred during an u...

Soil resource partitioning and dispersal limitation have been shown to shape the tree community structure of mature tropical forests, but are poorly studied in the context of forest succession. We examined the relative contributions of both ecological processes to the variation in the species composition of young tropical secondary forests at diffe...

Background: According to modern coexistence theory, ecologically similar species can coexist if fitness differences between them are small, or niche differences between them are large. However, these predictions have not been tested extensively in real systems and are difficult to examine in traits-based studies. Aims: The aim of our study was by u...

Climate change is predicted to have profound consequences for multispecies coexistence, and thus, patterns of biological diversity. These consequences will be mediated by direct and indirect impacts of environmental change on species’ vital rates and interactions. While the impacts of environmental change on individual species has received much att...

Coexistence between plant species is well known to depend on the outcomes of species interactions within an environmental context. The incorporation of environmental variation into empirical studies of coexistence are rare, however, due to the complex experiments needed to do so and the lack of feasible modelling approaches for determining how envi...

Nitrogen‐fixing trees (N 2 fixers) provide new nitrogen critical for rapid biomass accumulation of tropical forests during early secondary succession, but it remains unclear how the abundance of N 2 fixers in the forest community affects the growth of non‐fixers or the primary productivity of the whole forest. On the one hand, N 2 fixers may enhanc...

1.Community ecology is frequently invoked as complementary to and useful for guiding ecological restoration. While the conceptual literature is devoted to this unification, first-hand accounts from practitioners and ecologists suggest that integration may be weak in practice. To date, there have been no analyses of how extensively community ecology...

Aim A rich literature on forest succession provides general expectations for the steps forests go through while reassembling after disturbance, yet we still have a surprisingly poor understanding of why the outcomes of forest recovery after logging (or other disturbances) vary so extensively. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that regional spec...

Secondary forests are important carbon sinks, but their biomass dynamics vary markedly within and across landscapes. The biotic and abiotic drivers of this variation are still not well understood. We tested the effects of soil resource availability and competition by lianas on the biomass dynamics of young secondary tropical forests in Panama and a...

Alien plant species are known to have a wide range of impacts on recipient communities, from resident species' exclusions to coexistence with resident species. It remains unclear; however, if this variety of impacts is due to different invader strategies, features of recipient communities or both. To test this, we examined multiple plant invasions...

Background/Question/Methods There is a pressing need to understand how communities reassemble following human land-use change and how they differ from unmodified communities. It is often assumed that land-use changes and habitat destruction lead to species loss and corresponding loss of functional trait diversity – a common proxy for ecosystem fu...