Reconstructing richness in the plant fossil record
Palaios
1993
Journal Article
8
4
376-384
cretaceous tertiary boundary angiosperm diversification leaf litter forest assemblages vegetation diversity Pakitza paleoecology leaves fossils trees climate paleoclimate Parque Nacional del Manu plants field techniques Madre de Dios Bibliography
A comparison of species richness of leaf litter samples derived from a variety of modern forest types provides a means for estimating diversity of source forests in the fossil record. Single samples of temperate forest litter relatively consistently record about three-quarters of the source tree species larger than 10 cm diameter at breast height within the surrounding hectare. Tropical and subtropical samples, in contrast, contain a very small proportion of leaves of the tree species in the surrounding hectare of source forest, and demonstrate that the forest sampled by a single collection is about 0.1 to 0.125 hectare. Five combined samples from a tropical forest hectare with about 25-m intervals between adjacent samples can be used to extrapolate to hectare-based richness estimates, provided that sufficient specimens are recovered from each site. The major differences in methods needed for reconstruction of source forest richness from forests in different climatic zones indicates that a climatic filter should be applied to estimates of plant diversity in the past.