Niche differentiation is one of the key drivers of the biodiversity of coexisting species. Trees can provide very heterogeneous conditions from the bottom of the trunk to the upper twigs that can be used by a large variety of taxa. In two large Research Units, the lowland forest of Reassembly and a montaineous forest at the Kilimanjaro, a catalog of tree mocrohabitats (TREMs) was defined, surveyed and compared. The paper has been published in Ecological Indicators and also shows how to deal with sampling coverage for the diversity of TREMs at different sites. Overall, the diversity of such TREMs will define very useful expanatory variable to study variation in biodiversity of forest taxa within and across regions.
The work for Reassembly was conducted by Ronja Nußer during her Master thesis at the lab of Jörg Müller in Würzburg, and complemeted by a team at Senckenberg led by Matthias Schleuning for the Kilimanjaro.
