Treesearch

The ability of people to participate in the decisions that affect their lives is a tenet of democratic governance. In the broadest sense, public participation pertains to processes by which people engage in the development and implementation of public policies and programs. Fung (2006) stated that participation serves the democratic values of legitimacy and justice and improves the effectiveness of public action. Public participation can be carried out in a variety of ways, from casting votes at the ballot box, to testifying in court, to demonstrations and protests. It is also accomplished...

Juan A. Torres-Negron (Juan Torres) studied ants, wasps, termites and other insect groups. I reviewed 34 of his publications and grouped them into six subjects: ecological theory, taxonomy, chemistry, ecology, synthesis, and commentaries. Juan Torres used empirical fieldwork, keen observations, and experimentation to advance the understanding of ant taxonomy and ecology in Puerto Rico. His taxonomic work involved the description of new species and genera of various insect groups, as well as revisions of taxonomic groups, and other observations of the ecology and behavior of rare taxa. Juan...

This report is a companion report to the National Report on Sustainable Forests, except that the analysis in this case is specifically applied to tropical forests found on U.S. islands and U.S.-affiliated island jurisdictions in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Like its national counterpart, the report uses the Montréal Process Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management (MP C&I) to provide a comprehensive picture of forest conditions. Each of the seven criteria in the MP C&I is given a separate chapter, and the resulting analysis includes consideration of ecological,...

Es conocido que la biodiversidad de aves puede cambiar con la alteración del ambiente debido a factores de actividades humanas como la deforestación, que causa la fragmentación y el deterioro en la calidad de su hábitat o de su territorio de invierno, en el caso de las aves migratorias. El cambio climático incide también, especialmente por sequías prolongadas que pueden causar la destrucción de grandes sectores del bosque. El estudio del uso del hábitat y su biodiversidad en los diferentes ecosistemas es fundamental para la evaluación de la calidad ambiental. El análisis sobre la distribuci...

Spaceborne SAR interferometry (InSAR) has the potential of detecting forest change on a global scale with fine (meter-level) spatial resolution as well as on a monthly/weekly basis regardless of day or night. This is significant to characterize the land-use change and its impact on climate change. In this paper, both single-pass and repeat-pass SAR interferometry from spaceborne sensors are combined in order to detect and quantify (with Normalized RMSE ≤ 30%) forest disturbance at a large scale (dozens of kilometers) however with a fine spatial resolution (<; 1 hectare) based on two newly...

An upward shift in elevation is one of the most conspicuous species responses to climate change. Nevertheless, downward shifts and, apparently, the absences of response have also been recently reported. Given the growing evidence of multiple responses of species distributions due to climate change and the paucity of studies in the tropics, we evaluated the response of a montane bird community to climate change, without the confounding effects of land‐use change. To test for elevational shifts, we compared the distribution of 21 avian species in 1998 and 2015 using occupancy models. The...

Climate change is warming the temperatures and lengthening the Arctic growing season with potentially important effects on plant phenology. The ability of plant species to acclimate to changing climatic conditions will dictate the level to which their spatial coverage and habitat-type dominance is different in the future. While the effect of changes in temperature on phenology and species composition have been observed at the plot and at the regional scale, a systematic assessment at medium spatial scales using new noninvasive sensor techniques has not been performed yet. At four sites...

The majority of ecological studies in the tropics deal with organisms participating in grazing food webs, while few deal with the diversity of invertebrates in the soil, leaf litter or dead wood that participate in detrital food webs. For tropical forests, the status of information on soil animal diversity is limited, especially when compared to other ecosystems such as temperate forests, grasslands, and deserts. Given the high rate of forest conversion and persistence of deforestation in the tropics, it is important to study the diversity of its fauna and assess how global changes will...

Caribbean tropical forests are subject to hurricane disturbances of great variability. In addition to natural storm incongruity, climate change can alter storm formation, duration, frequency, and intensity. This model-based investigation assessed the impacts of multiple storms of different intensities and occurrence frequencies on the long-term dynamics of subtropical dry forests in Puerto Rico. Using the previously validated individual-based gap model ZELIG-TROP, we developed a new hurricane damage routine and parameterized it with site- and species-specific hurricane effects. A baseline...

Methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas that is both produced and consumed in soils by microbially mediated processes sensitive to soil redox. We evaluated the classical conceptual model of peatland CH4 dynamics—in which the water table position determines the vertical distribution of methanogenesis and methanotrophy—versus an emerging model in which methanogenesis and methanotrophy can both occur throughout the soil profile due to spatially heterogeneous redox and anaerobic CH4 oxidation. We simultaneously measured gross CH4 production and oxidation in situ across a microtopographical...