Treesearch

Hurricanes can cause severe damage to tropical forests. To understand the nature of hurricane impacts, we analyze and compare immediate effects from category-4 hurricane María in 2017 and category-3 hurricane Hugo in 1989 at Bisley Experimental Watersheds (BEW) in the Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico. We show that hurricane María caused lower mortality than hurricane Hugo, even though hurricane María was a stronger event with higher sustained wind. The lower mortality was due to the combination of lower accumulated cyclone energy at the site and more wind-resistant forest structure...

Nonnative tree species have received less scientific attention than nonnative species in general, but when a forest is colonized by a nonnative tree species, the ecological effects can be significant as a change in tree species composition can alter the structural and functional attributes of forest ecosystems. We assess the abundance, geographic distribution, contribution to forest structure (including carbon), and temporal trends of nonnative tree species between the most current inventory and the previous one, ranging from 3 to 15 years earlier, within the conterminous United States...

Catchments in the Luquillo Experimental Forest (LEF) of Puerto Rico are warm, wet and tropical with steep elevational relief creating gradients in temperature and rainfall. Long-term objectives of research at the site are to understand how changing climate and disturbance regimes alter hydrological and biogeochemical processes in the montane tropics and to provide information critical for managing and conserving tropical forest ecosystems globally. Measurements of hydrology and meteorology span decades, and currently include temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloud base level, throughfal...

The origins of the Luquillo Long Term Ecological Research Program are traced through four historical trends that still influence research activity in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo Mountains: (1) A history of identifying lands for protection and their designation for public uses; (2) A history of governmental and non-governmental institutions acting with the foresight to pursue scientific research for the benefit of economic development and the will to support scientific activity; (3) The uninterrupted progression of scientific activity through projects and programs that cumulatively developed a...

Understanding the complex and unpredictable ways ecosystems are changing and predicting the state of ecosystems and the services they will provide in the future requires coordinated, long-term research. This paper is a product of a U.S. National Science Foundation funded Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network synthesis effort that addressed anticipated changes in future populations and communities. Each LTER site described what their site would look like in 50 or 100 yr based on long-term patterns and responses to global change drivers in each ecosystem. Common themes emerged and...

Although past land use effects on composition and structure are described for many forest types, forested riparian areas have been overlooked. Riparian areas may contain unique species and high species richness, as well as contribute basal leaf-litter resources for aquatic fauna. We asked: Does past land use alter composition in riparian versus upland areas in wet tropical forest? Which vegetation life-forms characterize riparian zones? What is the composition and quantity of leaf-litter in riparian zones compared to uplands? Location Riparian and upland locations in tropical wet forest,...

Cloud forest species face many threats including, but not limited to, climate change and increased extreme weather events. On September 20th, 2017, Hurricane Maria hit the island of Puerto Rico, changing the amount of coverage, structure, and microclimate of its forests. Cloud forest epiphytes can be particularly susceptible to such dramatic changes. Following Hurricane Maria, we studied the leaf characteristics potentially associated with reduced leaf health in the Lepanthes woodburyana, an epiphytic micro-orchid, endemic to Puerto Rico. We specifically assessed whether the environmental...

Plants endemic to the Caribbean region have evolved in response to hurricanes. These natural phenomena appear to be more frequent and more intense in the Caribbean region, which requires the study and understanding of their influence on responses by these plants - particularly if rare and with limited geographic distribution within the region - as a priority for conservation. We took advantage of long-term monitoring studies at the Luquillo Experimental Forest/El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico to evaluate the short-term changes in population size and the distribution oflife stages...

Tropical ecosystems are expected to experience climate warming, with predicted increases in drying and heat extremes in the coming years. Understanding how these changes will affect terrestrial vertebrates such as amphibians is limited. The Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment in the Luquillo Experimental Forest in northeastern Puerto Rico allows us to study how the tropical forest responds to warming within a replicated plot design. From September 2018 to August 2019, we used mark-recapture sampling to investigate how the spatial population ecology of the common coqui frog...

Fine-resolution satellite imagery is needed for characterizing dry-season phenology in tropical forests since many tropical forests are very spatially heterogeneous due to their diverse species and environmental background. However, fine-resolution satellite imagery, such as Landsat, has a 16-day revisit cycle that makes it hard to obtain a high-quality vegetation index time series due to persistent clouds in tropical regions. To solve this challenge, this study explored the feasibility of employing a series of advanced technologies for reconstructing a high-quality Landsat time series...