Quantitative Ecology of Tropical Forests

Research in our lab at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute seeks to understand the processes determining forest biomass, dynamics, plant species composition, and diversity, and their variation within and among sites and over time. The biomass of a forest reflects the interplay of wood production via growth and loss via mortality, with growth and mortality rates in turn depending on climate and soils, and the responses of local plant species to these conditions. We focus especially on tropical forests.

The relative abundances of plants having different environmental responses themselves vary considerably among tropical forests together with climate, soils, and human influences, and any one tropical forest invariably contains many co-occurring plant species varying widely in their traits. Our research thus encompasses a wide variety of topics in community and ecosystem ecology, which we study through a combination of field research, remote sensing, data analysis, and modelling.

Tropical forests vary widely in their structure, productivity, tree death rates, and the relative abundance of trees of different heights, wood properties, drought vulnerability, etc. What are the mechanisms underlying this variation, and how can we capture these mechanisms in models to better understand and predict tropical forests responses to human influences?