Coexistence and relative abundance in forest trees.

Contemporary acceleration of biodiversity loss makes increasingly urgent the need to understand the controls of species coexistence. Tree diversity in particular plays a pivotal role in determining terrestrial biodiversity, through maintaining diversity of its dependent species and with them, their predators and parasites. Most theories of coexistence based on the principle of limiting similarity suggest that coexistence of competing species is inherently unstable; coexistence of competitors must be maintained by external forces such as disturbance, immigration or 'patchiness' of resources in space and time.