Tropical and subtropical dry forest life zones support forests with lower stature and species richness than do tropical and subtropical life zones with greater water availability. The number of naturalized species that can thrive and mix with native species to form novel forests in dry forest conditions in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands is lower than in other insular life zones. These no...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Single stressors such as scarcity of water and extreme temperatures dominate the struggle for life in severely dry desert ecosystems or cold polar regions and at high elevations. In contrast, stress in the tropics typically arises from a dynamic network of interacting stressors, such as availability of water, CO(2), light and nutrients, temperature and salinity. This require...

Dry forests represent a large percentage of tropical forests and are vulnerable to both anthropogenic and natural disturbances, yet important aspects of their sensitivity to disruption remain poorly understood. It is particularly unclear how changes in land-use or tropical storm patterns may affect the resiliency of phosphorus (P)-limited neotropical forests. In these systems, vegetation is sus...

The search for simple principles underlying the complex architecture of ecological communities such as forests still challenges ecological theorists. We use tree diameter distributions--fundamental for deriving other forest attributes--to describe the structure of tropical forests. Here we argue that tree diameter distributions of natural tropical forests can be explained by stochastic packing ...

Improved technologies are needed to advance our knowledge of the biophysical and human factors influencing tropical dry forests, one of the world’s most threatened ecosystems. We evaluated the use of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data to address two major needs in remote sensing of tropical dry forests, i.e., classification of forest types and delineation of forest successional status. We...

Microbial communities and their associated enzyme activities affect the amount and chemical quality of carbon (C) in soils. Increasing nitrogen (N) deposition, particularly in N-rich tropical forests, is likely to change the composition and behavior of microbial communities and feed back on ecosystem structure and function. This study presents a novel assessment of mechanistic links between mic...

We reviewed the evidence on the extent and efficacy of conservation of tropical forest biodiversity for each of the classes of conservation action defined by the new International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classification. Protected areas are the most tested conservation approach, and a number of studies show they are generally effective in slowing deforestation. There is some docu...

Spatial information on forest functional composition is needed to inform management and conservation efforts, yet this information is lacking, particularly in tropical regions. Canopy foliar traits underpin the functional biodiversity of forests, and have been shown to be remotely measurable using airborne 350–2510 nm imaging spectrometers. We used newly acquired imaging spectroscopy data const...

The tree species composition of seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTF) in north-eastern and central Brazil is analyzed to address the following hypotheses: (1) variations in species composition are related to both environment (climate and substrate) and spatial proximity; (2) SDTF floristic units may be recognized based on peculiar composition and environment; and (3) the Arboreal Caatinga, a d...

Tropical peat swamp forests in Indonesia store huge amounts of carbon and are responsible for enormous carbon emissions every year due to forest degradation and deforestation. These forest areas are in the focus of REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation, forest degradation, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks) projects, w...