Cross-scale responses of biodiversity to hurricane and anthropogenic disturbance in a tropical forest

In studies of biodiversity, considerations of scale —the spatial or temporal domain to which data provide inference—are important because of the non-arithmetic manner in which species richness increases with area (and total abundance) and be-cause fine-scale mechanisms (for example, recruit-ment, growth, and mortality of species) can interact with broad scale patterns (for example, habitat patch configuration) to influence dynamics in space and time. The key to understanding these dynamics is to consider patterns of environmental heteroge-neity, including patterns produced by natural and anthropogenic disturbance. We studied how spatial variation in three aspects of biodiversity of terres