Revealing the mechanisms of environmental niche partitioning within lowland tropical forests is important for understanding the drivers of current species distributions and potential vulnerability to environmental change. Tropical forest structure and species composition change across edaphic gradients in Borneo over short distances. However, our understanding of how edaphic conditions affect tree physiology and whether these relationships drive niche partitioning within Bornean forests remains incomplete. This study evaluated how leaf physiological function changes with nutrient availability...

Many tropical forests are dominated by edge habitat, with consequences for forest structure, carbon stocks and biodiversity. However, edge effects are highly variable and context-dependent, and are poorly quantified in oil palm landscapes. We studied edge effects in 10 lowland rainforest remnants bordering mature oil palm plantations on Borneo, by surveying 0.2 ha plots along transects running perpendicular to the forest edge (ten 1.6 km transects, 5-6 plots per transect; 57 plots in total). We...

Lianas (woody vines) are a key component of tropical forests, known to reduce forest carbon storage and sequestration and to be increasing in abundance. Analysing how and why lianas are distributed in forest canopies at landscape scales will help us determine the mechanisms driving changes in lianas over time. This will improve our understanding of liana ecology and projections of tropical forest carbon storage now and into the future. Despite competing hypotheses on the mechanisms...

This dataset includes values of 15 traits (total dry mass; root length to shoot length ratio; leaf mass fraction; root mass fraction; shoot mass fraction; leaf thickness; leaf force to punch; leaf area to shoot area ratio; leaf concentrations of N, P, K, Ca and Mg; leaf N: P concentration ratio; specific maximum root length) measured in February 2020 on 394 seedlings of 15 woody plant species growing in logged in the Ulu Segama Forest...

This dataset includes records of counts at four censuses between September 2019 and February 2021 of the number of seedlings of woody plants identified to species (or morphospecies) on a total of 207 plots located in either logged forest in the Ulu Segama Forest Reserve or unlogged forest in the Danum Valley Conservation Area, Malaysia. These data were collected as part of NERC project “Seeing the fruit for the trees in Borneo: responding to an...