Forest Plantations in Manabí (Ecuador): Assessment of Fragmentation and Connectivity to Support Dry Tropical Forests Conservation

Fragmentation, disturbance and tree diversity conservation in tropical montane forests

1. Loss in forest cover associated with human activities leads to forest islands within a fragmented landscape. Anthropogenic disturbance may also directly alter tree species diversity. Habitat fragmentation and disturbance may have implications for biodiversity conservation and can affect a variety of population and community processes over a range of temporal and spatial scales. Effects are m...

Natural Forest Management and Conservation of Biodiversity in Tropical Forests

As a reaction to the continued dwindling of tropical forest resources, many research and development organizations have turned to the idea of natural forest management in the hope of making tropical forest lands more profitable while maintaining biodiversity. Assertions of sustainability in logging practices have been inadequately supported, however. We begin with a review of the present knowle...

Fragmentation and Tropical Forests

Model systems are needed to examine fragment area effects on food web structure where other factors are relatively constant. Human-induced fragmentation is typically associated with human activities, which may complicate interpretation of results from fragmentation studies. Forests on Hawai`i Island periodically experience a unique natural disturbance where lava flows into forests, leaving behi...

Forest Structure in Low-Diversity Tropical Forests: A Study of Hawaiian Wet and Dry Forests

The potential influence of diversity on ecosystem structure and function remains a topic of significant debate, especially for tropical forests where diversity can range widely. We used Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) methodology to establish forest dynamics plots in montane wet forest and lowland dry forest on Hawai'i Island. We compared the species diversity, tree density, basal are...

Carbon Cycling in Teak Plantations in Comparison with Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests in Thailand