Tropical forests have been the object of intensive donor support for the last 15-20 years. Particularly striking is the way in which forestry has figured as a vehicle for wider environmental concerns, and has given them concrete expression. Early on, the focus was mainly on resource depletion (the threat of desertification, the fuelwood crisis, etc.) and on ways to rebuild tree stocks through p...

Previous studies have shown that canopy metrics from lidar data are highly correlated with aboveground biomass in a variety of closedcanopy forests, however the generality of these site-specific relationships has remained untested. In this study, we compare relationships between lidar canopy metrics and forest structural summaries from a tropical wet forest site in Costa Rica and across a serie...

The areal extent and spatial distribution of evergreen forests in the tropical zones are important for the study of climate, carbon cycle and biodiversity. However, frequent cloud cover in the tropical regions makes mapping evergreen forests a challenging task. In this study we developed a simple and novel mapping algorithm that is based on the temporal profile analysis of Land Surface Water In...

Hirota et al. (Reports, 14 October 2011, p. 232) used spatial data to show that grasslands, savannas, and forests represent opposing stable states. Reanalyzing their data and drawing from temporal studies, we argue that spatial analyses underestimate the bistability of grasslands and savannas due to limitations of substituting space for time. We propose that temporal and spatial data are needed...

Terrestrial biosphere-atmosphere carbon dioxide (CO(2)) exchange is dominated by tropical forests, where photosynthetic carbon (C) uptake is thought to be phosphorus (P)-limited. In P-poor tropical forests, P may also limit organic matter decomposition and soil C losses. We conducted a field-fertilization experiment to show that P fertilization stimulates soil respiration in a lowland tropical ...

From an unprecedented experiment using airborne measurements performed over the rich forests of Réunion Island, this paper aims to present a methodology for the classification of diverse tropical forest biomes as retrieved from vertical profiles measured using a full-waveform LiDAR. This objective is met through the retrieval of both the canopy height and the Leaf Area Index (LAI), obtained as ...

Leaf phenology of tropical evergreen forests affects carbon and water fluxes. In an earlier study of a seasonally moist evergreen tropical forest site in the Amazon basin, time series data of Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) from the VEGETATION and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors showed an unexpected seasonal pattern, with higher EVI in the late dry season than in t...

I thank Lewis et al. for their letter [1] in response to my recent review article in TREE [2], but argue here that the response of tropical forests to global and regional anthropogenic change, hereafter anthropogenic change, is highly uncertain despite evidence marshaled elsewhere [1,3,4]. Here, I pose six questions to pinpoint sources of this uncertainty. First, are old-growth tropical forests...

A persistent challenge in ecology is to explain the high diversity of tree species in tropical forests. Although the role of species characteristics in maintaining tree diversity in tropical forests has been the subject of theory and debate for decades, spatial patterns in local diversity have not been analyzed from the viewpoint of individual species. To measure scale-dependent local diversity...

Decomposing litter in forest ecosystems supplies nutrients to plants, carbon to heterotrophic soil microorganisms and is a large source of CO2 to the atmosphere. Despite its essential role in carbon and nutrient cycling, the temperature sensitivity of leaf litter decay in tropical forest ecosystems remains poorly resolved, especially in tropical montane wet forests where the warming trend may b...