Area 4 — Structural Diversity as an Ecological Framework

Digital datasets are not only tools for measurement — they also open new theoretical windows into how forests work. Using data from over 3 million trees across continental North America, our group developed and validated the concept of structural diversity: the volumetric capacity and three-dimensional physical arrangement of vegetation in an ecosystem.

Structural diversity is a stronger predictor of forest productivity than species diversity across the full range of climate conditions in North America. These finding challenges assumptions embedded in much of biodiversity-ecosystem function theory and suggests that the physical organization of forests — not just the number of species within them — is a primary driver of what forests can do. This conceptual contribution has been among the most-cited work published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment in recent years.

A scatter plot showing the structural diversity of trees. The dark purple shows the high heights in meters while the lighter orange represents the low heights in meters. The green spots represent the Cut-off in meters. Dark green represents a cut-off of 0.5 meters, and light green represents a cut-off of 5.0 meters. The Y axis represents the height in meters and ranges from zero to fifty.

Publications

  1. Wang, J., Choi, D., LaRue, E., Atkins, J., Foster, J., Matthes, J., Fahey, R., Fei, S., & Hardiman, B. (2024). NEON-SD: A 30-m structural diversity product derived from the NEON discrete-return LiDAR point cloud. Scientific Data, 11, 1174. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-04018-0
  2. LaRue, E.A., Knott, J.A., Domke, G.M., Chen, H.Y.H., Guo, Q., Hisano, M., Oswalt, C., Oswalt, S., Kong, N., Potter, K.M., & Fei, S. (2023). Structural diversity as a novel and reliable predictor for ecosystem productivity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 21(1), 33–39. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2586
  3. LaRue, E.A., Hardiman, B.S., Elliott, J.M., & Fei, S. (2019). Structural diversity as a predictor of ecosystem function. Environmental Research Letters, 14, 114011. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab49bb
  4. Fei, S., LaRue, E.A., Hardiman, B.S., & Dahlin, K.M. (2023). Structural diversity: a digital revolution. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 21(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2600
  5. LaRue, E.A., Rezendes, K., Choi, D., Wang, J., Downing, A., Fei, S., & Hardiman, B. (2025). Gradient surface metrics of ecosystem structural diversity and their relationship with productivity across macrosystems. Ecosphere, 16, e70172. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.70172