forest roads are directions in natural habitats that used to transport wood products, secondary forest products and recreation. constructing forest roads causes trees clearing with specified width thus lead to direct or indirect changes in forest ecosystems and forest environment. this study aims to assess the changes of diversity and richness indices in main and secondary forest roads in a par...

The mode and tempo of forest compositional change during periods of rapid climate change, including the potential for the fire regime to produce nonlinear relationships between climate and vegetation, is a long-standing theme of forest ecological research. In the old conifer forests of the coastal Pacific Northwest, fire disturbances are sufficiently rare that their relation to climate and thei...

Understanding the drivers of species adaptations to changing environments on the one hand and the limits for hybridization on the other hand is among the hottest questions in evolutionary biology. Parasites represent one of the major selective forces driving host evolution and at least those with free-living stages are at the same time dependent on the ecological conditions of their host's habi...

1. The concentration, stoichiometry and resorption of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in plant leaves are often used as proxies of the availability of these growth-limiting nutrients, but the responses of these metrics to changes in nutrient availability remain largely untested for tropical forest trees. 2. We evaluated changes in N and P concentrations, N/P ratios and resorption for four commo...

Long-term monitoring of distributed, multiple plots is the key to quantify macroecological patterns and changes. Here we examine the evidence for concerted changes in the structure, dynamics and composition of old-growth Amazonian forests in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s and 1990s, mature forests gained biomass and underwent accelerated growth and dynamics, all consistent with a wide...

Forest pest damage is expected to increase with global change. Tree diversity could mitigate this impact, but unambiguous demonstration of the diversity-resistance relationship is lacking in semi-natural mature forests. We used a network of 208 forest plots sampled along two orthogonal gradients of increasing tree species richness and latitudes to assess total tree defoliation in Europe. We fou...

Mexican temperate forests, at the southernmost end of the distribution range of this ecosystem, are the world's centre of diversity of pine and oak, with 55 and 161 species, respectively. Such forests are threatened by land-use change, unsustainable forest management practices, and climate change; these threats reduce their diversity, alter the distribution ranges of species, modify disturbance...

We studied the contribution of oribatid mites in the dynamics of litter decomposition in an experiment using litterbags of three different mesh sizes (20 microns, 250 microns, and 1 cm). The experiment was carried out at a primary forest (FLO), a secondary forest (SEC), and at two polyculture systems (POA and POC). We compared the weight loss of the leaves of Vismia guianensis and the changes o...