High-resolution forest mapping for behavioural studies in the Nature Reserve 'Les Nouragues', French Guiana.

Where have all the tadpoles gone? Individual genetic tracking of amphibian larvae until adulthood

Reliably marking larvae and reidentifying them after metamorphosis is a challenge that has hampered studies on recruitment, dispersal, migration and survivorship of amphibians for a long time, as conventional tags are not reliably retained through metamorphosis. Molecular methods allow unique genetic fingerprints to be established for individuals. Although microsatellite markers have successful...

Is temporal variation of seedling communities determined by environment or by seed arrival? A test in a neotropical forest

NATALIA NORDEN, JÉRÔME CHAVE, ADELINE CAUBÈRE*, PATRICK CHÂTELET†, NICOLE FERRONI, PIERRE-MICHEL FORGET* and CHRISTOPHE THÉBAUD Laboratoire Evolution et Diversité Biologique, UMR 5174 Université Paul Sabatier/CNRS, F-31062 Toulouse, France, * Département Ecologie et Gestion de la Biodiversité, UMR 5176 CNRS-MNHN, 4 av. du Petit Château, F-91800 Brunoy, France, and † Station d’Etudes des Nouragu...

Weak Environmental Controls of Tropical Forest Canopy Height in the Guiana Shield

Canopy height is a key variable in tropical forest functioning and for regional carbon inventories. We investigate the spatial structure of the canopy height of a tropical forest, its relationship with environmental physical covariates, and the implication for tropical forest height variation mapping. Making use of high-resolution maps of LiDAR-derived Digital Canopy Model (DCM) and environment...

Humus profiles and successional development in a rock savanna (Nouragues inselberg, French Guiana): a micro-morphological approach infers fire as a disturbance event

Broad-scale spatial pattern of forest landscape types in the Guiana Shield

Detecting broad scale spatial patterns across the South American rainforest biome is still a major challenge. Although several countries do possess their own, more or less detailed land-cover map, these are based on classifications that appear largely discordant from a country to another. Up to now, continental scale remote sensing studies failed to fill this gap. They mostly result in crude re...