Treesearch

Cuba and Puerto Rico have much in common and have been referred to in a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tío as “…son de un pájaro las dos alas” (two wings of one bird). Throughout their histories, they have faced similar challenges in maintaining food security and ecosystem health. Global climate change now threatens both islands with parallel challenges to their similar cropping systems, forests, and producer demographics. Rising temperatures and resultant shifts in climate patterns have led to an increased occurrence of drought, punctuated by tropical storms and hurricanes of increasing...

We used a distance-sampling survey method and multivariate statistics to obtain a unique estimate of bird species density and seasonal variation in shade-coffee plantations. Our aim was to determine which cultivation practices among plantations contribute most to bird abundance. We conducted avian species counts at 200 points distributed across 10 shade-coffee plantations bordering the lower slopes of the Mombacho Volcano Natural Reserve, in western Nicaragua. We measured vegetation structure (coffee plants and overstory). We used principal components analysis (PCA) among 14 habitat...

A previous review of earthworm impacts on greenhouse-gas emissions concluded that earthworms elevated soil CO2 emissions with no apparent influence on soil organic carbon (SOC), especially in laboratory incubations and in agroecosystems. This conclusion suggests that the elevated soil CO2 emissions may come from enhanced plant litter decomposition. Despite the known important role of earthworms on regulating ecosystem processes, a quantitative analysis of the relationship between earthworms and decomposition in global terrestrial ecosystems is still missing. Here, we present a quantitative...

In cities across the world, urban environmental stewardship efforts are increasingly popular activities that citizens and non-governmental organizations take to address and improve the environmental health and quality of life of their urban environment. Urban environmental stewardship is defined as the act of civic groups of conserving, managing, monitoring, advocating for, and educating the public about a wide range of quality of life issues in urban area through, for example, tree planting, stream restoration, education campaigns, water quality monitoring, to name a few. Traditionally...

Puerto Rico’s infrastructure collapsed when exposed to the forces of hurricane María. The event also changed the course of rivers, altered the topography of sectors of the island, flooded lowlands and parts of uplands, and the ocean surge changed beach profiles and collapsed structures built close to the ocean. Islanders were left without power, water, and communications, and without access to cash and government services such as health and protection. People resurrected a life style and survival techniques thought to have been left behind in a past already forgotten by many. Complex...

At a “clean air” trade winds site in northeastern Puerto Rico, we found an apparent paradox: atmospheric total mercury (THg) deposition was highest of any site in the USA Mercury Deposition Network, but assimilation into the local food web was quite low. Avian blood THg concentrations (n = 31, from eight species in five foraging guilds) ranged widely from 0.2 to 32 ng g−1 (median of 4.3 ng g−1 ). Within this population, THg was significantly greater at a low-elevation site near a wetland compared to an upland montane site, even when the comparison was limited to a single species. Overall,...

El huracán Otto, registrado históricamente como el huracán que tocó tierra firme más al sur en Centroamérica, fue un fenómeno de categoría 3 que impacto el sureste de Nicaragua el 24 de noviembre del 2016. Para describir los efectos del huracán en la avifauna, se realizaron en la Estación Biológica La Lupe conteos de aves antes y después del paso del fenómeno. En los sitios que se realizaron las observaciones, se catalogaron los hábitats como bosque maduro y joven de acuerdo a la diversidad florística y DAP, y se anotó el estrato vertical en el que se observaban. Se determinaron los grupos...

The world´s urbanization forecast shows that 60% of the human population will be living in cities by 2050 (United Nations et al. 2017). This growth will negatively impact natural forests surrounding urban areas and will contribute to losses of biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services. Urban green infrastructure is often associated with improvements to city aesthetics and even with improvements in resident (Kabisch and van den Bosch 2017).

Hurricanes generate disturbances in forests such as canopy opening, fallen trees and leaves which alter physicochemical characteristics of the habitat. Litter decomposition depends primarily on the interaction among climate, litter quality and biota, as a consequence any change in habitats will result in changes in these factors. Our objective is to evaluate the effects of hurricane driven changes to forests on green litter decomposition, decomposer communities and nutrient mineralization. For this study, three blocks were selected, each with two plots of 20m x 20m, one plot was used for...

Coffee is the second largest export product of developing countries and is one of the ten most important cultivated crops in Puerto Rico, especially in the mountainous region. The coffee berry borer (CBB) Hypothenemus hampei Ferrari (1967), which arrived in Puerto Rico in 2007, is considered the most destructive pest in all coffee producing areas worldwide. The control of CBB is an enormous challenge because this insect spends most of its life inside the coffee berry, even, the use of insecticides has proved ineffective. Therefore, the development and implementation of biological control...