We will combine data on community ecology and phylogeny from a 50 ha rain forest plot to infer the major processes determining community assembly. This project ultimately addresses the question of the origin and maintenance of the very high diversity found in tropical rain forests. The data collected to construct the phylogeny of species will also be exploited to investigate the efficiency of DNA barcoding approaches which could become a very important tool in helping species identification, notably in FDP or other tropical forest plant inventories.