Seedling survival responses to conspecific density, soil nutrients, and irradiance vary with age in a tropical forest

Understanding processes that promote species coexistence is integral to diversity maintenance. In hyperdiverse tropical forests, local conspecific density (LCD) and light are influential to woody seedling recruitment and soil nutrients are often limiting, yet the simultaneous effects of these factors on seedling survival across time remain unknown. We fit species-and age-specific models to census and resource data of seedlings of 68 woody species from a Costa Rican wet tropical forest. In decreasing order of prevalence, seedling survivorship was related to LCD, soil base cations, irradiance, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Species-specific responses to factors did not covary, providing evidence that species life history strategies have not converged to one continuum of high-surviving stress tolerant to low-surviving stress intolerant species. Survival responses to all factors varied over the average seedling's lifetime, indicating seedling requirements change with age and conclusions drawn about processes important to species coexistence depend on temporal resolution.