Treesearch

Element uptake from substrate and resorption capacity of nutrients before leaf shedding are frequently species-specific and difficult to determine in natural settings. We sampled populations of Rhizophora mangle (salt-excluding species) and Laguncularia racemosa (salt-secreting species) in a coastal lagoon in the upper section of the Maracaibo strait in western Venezuela to estimate accumulation and resorption of mineral elements. Leaves collected fortnightly during 4 months within the rainy season were stratified as young, adult, old, and senescent. We measured changes in concentration of...

The southernmost presence of Rhizophora mangle in the western Atlantic coast occurs in coastal wetlands between 27 and 28ºS in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. We selected mangrove communities at the estuary of Rio Tavares, Florianopolis, and Sonho Beach, Palhosa, for measurement of photosynthetic performance and intrinsic water use efficiency of R. mangle and coexisting individuals of Avicennia schaueriana and Laguncularia racemosa, during the spring season. We used gas exchange techniques and isotopic signatures of C and N to estimate instantaneous water use and carboxylation...

Background: Carbon stocks and fluxes in tropical forests remain large sources of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. Airborne lidar remote sensing is a powerful tool for estimating aboveground biomass, provided that lidar measurements penetrate dense forest vegetation to generate accurate estimates of surface topography and canopy heights. Tropical forest areas with complex topography present a challenge for lidar remote sensing. Results: We compared digital terrain models (DTM) derived from airborne lidar data from a mountainous region of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil to 35 ground...

The Tapajós National Forest (FLONA Tapajós) has 600,000 hectares of protected forest, and is situated 50 km south of the city of Santarém, Pará, Brazil, a port city of 250,000 inhabitants that is located at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers. There is a lot of farmland in the region, which offers many opportunities to study changes in land use. Selective wood harvesting is one type of land use that is particularly important to the economy of Santarém. Wet and dry deposition of organic material can be an important source of nutrients for plants, and this is especially true when...

This work presents basic information on tropical lichenology. It also describes general aspects about the ecology and biodiversity of these organisms in eight forest ecosystems present along an elevational gradient in northeastern Puerto Rico. These ecosystems consist of elfin woodlands, palo colorado, sierra palm, tabonuco, lowland moist, dry, mangrove, and Pterocarpus forests. Lichen communities are mainly described in terms of general ecological attributes (e.g., species richness, common species, etc.). Basic information about the environment and vegetation found in these forests is...

Aims The fruits of Erithalis fruticosa L. and Lantana involucrata L. are important in the diet of US federally endangered Kirtland’s Warblers (Setophaga kirtlandii) wintering in the Bahamas archipelago. These two shrubs occur in tropical and subtropical dry forests, including forests that have been subjected to recent disturbance. Despite their importance to the endangered warbler, the disturbance ecology of these shrubs is poorly understood. We sought to determine, based on functional characteristics of the plants, whether their presence is favored by a particular type or regime of...

Inference about future climate change impacts typically relies on one of three approaches: manipulative experiments, historical comparisons (broadly defined to include monitoring the response to ambient climate fluctuations using repeat sampling of plots, dendroecology, and paleoecology techniques), and space-for-time substitutions derived from sampling along environmental gradients. Potential limitations of all three approaches are recognized. Here we address the congruence among these three main approaches by comparing the degree to which tundra plant community composition changes (i) in...

This research note compiles 43 years of research and monitoring data to produce the first comprehensive checklist of the dry forest avian community found within the Guánica Biosphere Reserve. We provide an overview of the reserve along with sighting locales, a list of 185 birds with their resident status and abundance, and a list of the available bird habitats. Photographs of habitats and some of the bird species are included.

Corrigendum published on April 20, 2016 https://doi.org/10.1175/EI-D-15-0044.1. Incorporated to the original PDF. As is true of many tropical regions, northeastern Puerto Rico is an ecologically sensitive area with biological life that is highly elevation dependent on precipitation and temperature. Climate change has the potential to increase the risk of losing endemic species and habitats. Consequently, it is important to explore the pattern of trends in precipitation and temperature along an elevation gradient. Statistical derivatives of a frequently sampled dataset of precipitation and...

Santo Domingo’s Colonial City (Ciudad Colonial in Spanish) was established in 1498 by Christopher Columbus, making it the first European settlement in the New World and the site of the first cathedral, hospital, customs house and university in the Americas. The city was laid out on a grid pattern that became the model for almost all town planners in the New World (UNESCO 2014). It is located along the western bank of the Ozama River and is about one square kilometer in size (see fold-out map).