Effects of structural complexity on environmental heterogeneity
(Hypothesis 2)
An increase in structural complexity of the forest canopy resulted in
increasing light heterogeneity for SSCI (p = 0.008, r² = 0.28, see Fig.
4), TRI (p = 0.017, r² = 0.42, not shown) and DBHsd (p = 0.007, r² =
0.44, not shown). The soil parameter C:N ratio correlated positively to
SSCI (p = 0.0002, r² = 0.14) and DBHsd (p = 0.02, r² = 0.44), and
potassium increased positively with SSCI (p = 0.043, r² = 0.41) but
after removing extreme values (excluding all values above 1.5 *
interquartile range) no effect was found. During model selection forest
communities did not remain in the model of best fit and thus are not
shown here.