Although our methods can be improved upon, our results
demonstrate the usefulness of combining species inventory
lists with plant functional traits such as wood density.
The methodology we developed to identify the unimodal
relationship between average wood density and diversity
in a plot offers a more effective means to detect such relationships
than has been seen in previous ecological studies.
The detected unimodal relationship between average
wood density and diversity in a plot with this methodology
has an important implication, namely that the highest
diversity does not automatically equal the highest conservation
value. Old-growth forests with the highest average
wood density might have less diversity yet contain higher
abundances of range-restricted (endemic) species. The
ability of our method to identify such areas is its main
contribution to conservation biology in the tropics