A large proportion of the world’s tropical forests consists of lowland rain forests situated in basins of major tropical rivers, such as the Amazon, the Congo, and the Sepik–Ramu and Fly– Strickland river systems of New Guinea. These forests also form a major part of the three remaining Tropical Wilderness Areas, defined as large pristine areas exceeding 10,000 km of which > 70% is free from an...

Despite recent progress in understanding mechanisms of tree species coexistence in tropical forests, a simple explanation for the even more extensive diversity of insects feeding on these plants has been missing. We compared folivorous insects from temperate and tropical trees to test the hypothesis that herbivore species coexistence in more diverse communities could reflect narrow host specifi...

Question: How do the diversity, size structure, and spatial pattern of woody species in a temperate (Mediterranean climate) forest compare to temperate and tropical forests? Location: Mixed evergreen coastal forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California, USA. Methods: We mapped, tagged, identified, and measured all woody stems ( 1 cm diameter) in a 6-ha forest plot, following Center for Tropic...

Tropical forests are carbon-dense and highly productive ecosystems. Consequently, they play an important role in the global carbon cycle. In the present study we used an individual-based forest model (FORMIND) to analyze the carbon balances of a tropical forest. The main processes of this model are tree growth, mortality, regeneration, and competition. Model parameters were calibrated using for...

In the wake of widespread loss of old-growth forests throughout the tropics, secondary forests will likely play a growing role in the conservation of forest biodiversity. We considered a complex hierarchy of factors that interact in space and time to determine the conservation potential of tropical secondary forests. Beyond the characteristics of local forest patches, spatial and temporal lands...

Both local- and landscape-scale processes drive succession of secondary forests in human-modified tropical landscapes. Nonetheless, until recently successional changes in composition and diversity have been predominantly studied at the patch level. Here, we used a unique dataset with 45 randomly selected sites across a mixed-use tropical landscape in central Panama to study forest succession si...

Just as features of the physical and biotic environment constrain evolution of ecological and morphological traits, they may also affect evolution of communication systems. Here we analyze constraints on rates of vocal evolution, using a large dataset of New World avian sister taxa. We show that species breeding in tropical forests sing at generally lower frequencies and across narrower bandwid...

The Hawaiian Islands are an ideal location to study the response of tropical forests to climate variability because of their extreme isolation in the middle of the Pacific, which makes them especially sensitive to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Most research examining the response of tropical forests to drought or El Niño have focused on rainforests, however, tropical dry forests cover a ...

The lush green vegetation of moist tropical forest is not what it appears. Dissolve away all the plant matter from the dense foliage, giant buttressed trunks, tangled lianas, and sinuous roots, and a ghostly fungal shadow of the forest will remain. These fungi—diverse symbionts that include mutualists, commensals, and parasites—play critical roles in the dynamics, diversity, structure, and func...