Many countries have made major commitments to carbon sequestration through reforestation under the Paris Climate Agreement, and recent studies have illustrated the potential for large amounts of carbon sequestration in tropical second-growth forests. However, carbon gains in second-growth forests are threatened by non-permanence, i.e. release of carbon into the atmosphere from clearing or distu...

Three-dimensional (3-D) visualizations of forest landscapes are quantitative ecological information-based techniques that can be used to visualize forest structure, dynamics, landscape transformations and regional plans. Visualizing forests and landscapes with limited ground observations are often the primary challenge for quality animations. Conducting stand-level field surveys over a large fo...

This paper describes a deterministic computer model for simulating forest dynamics. The model predicts the long-term dynamics of hollow-bearing trees which occur in a single-species (monotypic) forest stand under an array of different timber harvesting regimes over a time scale of centuries. It is applied to a number of different timber harvesting scenarios in the mountain ash (Eucalyptus regna...

Regenerating forests influence the global carbon (C) cycle, and understanding how climate change will affect patterns of regeneration and C storage is necessary to predict the rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2 ) increase in future decades. While experimental elevation of CO2 has revealed that young forests respond with increased productivity, there remains considerable uncertainty as to h...

Understanding the recovery dynamics of ecosystems presents a major challenge in the human-impacted tropics. We tested whether secondary forests follow equilibrium or non-equilibrium dynamics by evaluating community reassembly over time, across different successional stages, and among multiple life stages. Based on long-term and static data from six 1-ha plots in NE Costa Rica, we show that seco...

Tree mortality and recruitment are key factors influencing forest dynamics, but the driving mechanisms of these processes remain unclear. To better understand these driving mechanisms, we studied forest dynamics over a 5-year period in a 20-ha sub-tropical forest in the Dinghushan Nature Reserve, South China. The goal was to identify determinants of tree mortality/recruitment at the local scale...

Extreme climatic events can trigger gradual or abrupt shifts in forest ecosystems via the reduction or elimination of foundation species. However, the impacts of these events on foundation species' demography and forest dynamics remain poorly understood. Here we quantified dynamics for both evergreen and deciduous broad-leaved species groups, utilizing a monitoring permanent plot in a subtropic...

Wyant, J.G., Alig, R.J. and Bechtold, W.A., 1991. Physiographic position, disturbance and species composition in North Carolina coastal plain forests. For. Ecol. Manage., 41: 1-19. Relations among physiographic heterogeneity, disturbance and temporal change in forest composition were analyzed on 765 forest stands in the southern coastal plain of North Carolina. Physiographic position strongly r...

Understanding forest changes and its trajectory is important to develop policy options and future scenarios for climate analysis. This research is conducted to gain insights on secondary forests change using Mississippi, USA, as a case study. We investigate the spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of secondary forests at high resolution and examine the forces driving their changes. An extensi...

Forest biophysical structure - the arrangement and frequency of leaves and stems - emerges from growth, mortality and space filling dynamics, and may also influence those dynamics by structuring light environments. To investigate this interaction, we developed models that could use LiDAR remote sensing to link leaf area profiles with tree size distributions, comparing models which did not (meta...