Understanding how the spatial organization of diversified plant communities alters their performance is an important step in designing and managing diversified agroecosystems. The high level of spatial heterogeneity in tropical agroforests makes this task challenging. In 19 agroforestry plots in Talamanca (Costa Rica), we analyzed the effect of the structure of the plant community in the neighborhood of each individual cacao tree and banana plant on their growth and yield parameters. We developed an individual-based analysis in two steps. First, we selected without a priori the distance at which the number of neighboring plants of a given functional group (banana plants, cacao trees, fruit trees, or wood trees) best explained the proportion of attainable yield (PAY) of cacao and banana plants. In a second step, we tested the significance of the abundances of the four groups of plants in a complete model that predicted the PAY of banana and cacao plants. The abundance of neighboring plants did not increase banana PAY except in the case of other banana plants, suggesting that banana plants yield better when aggregated. All other groups of plants tended to reduce both banana and cacao PAY. In the case of wood trees, these trends were not significant. Interestingly, our results suggests that it is possible to associate banana plants and cocoa trees to moderate densities of other plants without reducing their yield. The two complete linear models predicted about 60 % of the variance of the average response of the PAY to the neighboring plant assemblage. We suggest that in the future, it would be important to differentiate processes (resources partitioning, pest and diseases) inside our statistical approach. While requiring much more data, it could be useful to address the effect of cultural practices.

了解多样化植物群落的空间组织如何改变其性能是设计和管理多样化农业生态系统的重要一步。热带农林中高度的空间异质性使这项任务具有挑战性。在塔拉曼卡（哥斯达黎加）的19个农林业小区中，我们分析了可可树和香蕉植物附近植物群落结构对其生长和产量参数的影响。我们分两个步骤开发了基于个人的分析。首先，我们没有先验地选择给定功能组的相邻植物（香蕉植物，可可树，果树或木树）的数量最能解释可可和香蕉植物可达到的产量（PAY）比例的距离。在第二步中，我们在预测香蕉和可可植物的PAY的完整模型中测试了四类植物的丰度的重要性。除了其他香蕉植物外，邻近植物的丰度并没有增加香蕉的PAY，这表明当聚集时香蕉植物的收成更好。所有其他类别的植物都倾向于减少香蕉和可可树的PAY。就木树而言，这些趋势并不明显。有趣的是，我们的结果表明可以将香蕉植物和可可树与其他植物的中等密度相关联，而不会降低其产量。这两个完整的线性模型预测了PAY对邻近植物组合的平均响应方差的60％。我们建议，将来在我们的统计方法中区分流程（资源分配，病虫害）非常重要。在需要更多数据的同时，解决文化习俗的影响可能很有用。