Treesearch

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...

This paper reports and reflects on the pilot application of an 11-step policy learning protocol that was developed by Cashore and Lupberger (2015) based on several years of Cashore's multi-author collaborations. The protocol was applied for the first time in Peru in 2015 and 2016 by the IUFRO Working Party on Forest Policy Learning Architectures (hereinafter referred to as the project team). The protocol integrates insights from policy learning scholarship (Hall 1993, Sabatier 1999) with Bernstein and Cashore's (2000, 2012) four pathways of influence framework. The pilot implementation in...

We quantified long-term successional trajectories of canopy arthropods on six tree species in a tropical rainforest ecosystem in the Luquillo Mountains of Puerto Rico that experienced repeated hurricane-induced disturbances during the 19-yr study (1991–2009). We expected: 1) differential performances of arthropod species to result in taxon- or guild-specific responses; 2) differences in initial conditions to result in distinct successional responses to each hurricane; and 3) the legacy of hurricane-created gaps to persist despite subsequent disturbances. At least one significant effect of...

Novel forests are naturally regenerating forests that have established on degraded lands and have a species composition strongly influenced by introduced species. We studied ecophysiological traits of an introduced species (Castilla elastica Sessé) and several native species growing side by side in novel forests dominated by C. elastica in Puerto Rico. We hypothesized that C. elastica has higher photosynthetic capacity and makes more efficient use of resources than co-occurring native species. Using light response curves, we found that the photosynthetic capacity of C. elastica is similar...