Palms - emblems of tropical forests

Soil-based habitat partitioning in understorey palms in lower montane tropical forests

Aim Dispersal assembly and niche assembly are two competing theories proposed to explain the maintenance of species diversity in tropical forests. Dispersal theory emphasizes the role of chance colonization events and distancelimited seed dispersal in explaining species abundance and distribution, whereas niche theory emphasizes differences among species in requirements for potentially limiting...

Tropical Forests

To understand where and why tropical forests exist, one must begin with some essential facts of geography and climatic systems. By definition, ‘the tropics’ lie between 238N and 238S latitude, the area within which the sun lies directly overhead at some point in its seasonal progression. Thefluxof solar energywithin this region is high, due to the fact that incoming sunlight is projected at a 9...

Tropical Rain Forests

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...

The future of tropical forests.

Five anthropogenic drivers--land use change, wood extraction, hunting, atmospheric change, climate change--will largely determine the future of tropical forests. The geographic scope and intensity of these five drivers are in flux. Contemporary land use change includes deforestation (approximately 64,000 km(2) yr(-1) for the entire tropical forest biome) and natural forests regenerating on aban...