About
210
Publications
155,396
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
10,197
Citations
Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (210)
High local densities of tropical forest plant species have been found in riparian forests of Belizean and Venezuelan savannas. Soil and light-intensity heterogeneity within the forests is limited and species co-existence may be mediated more by specialized disturbance regimes than by micro-habitat specialization. Provided that this local diversity...
QuestionsAt millennial scales, is the historic evolution of tropical plant communities the result of ‘random walk’? Are presence and abundance of taxa independent of environmental variability? LocationLake Petén-Itzá, Guatemala, Central American lowlands. Methods
We use an 86 000-yr-long pollen record to study the relative contribution of neutral m...
The development of forest succession theory has been based on studies in temperate and tropical wet forests. As rates and pathways of succession vary with the environment, advances in successional theory and study approaches are challenged by controversies derived from such variation and by the scarcity of studies in other ecosystems. During five y...
Biodiversity conservation and ecosystem-service provision will increasingly depend on the existence of secondary vegetation. Our success in achieving these goals will be determined by our ability to accurately estimate the structure and diversity of such communities at broad geographic scales. We examined whether the texture (the spatial variation...
Analyzing the relationship between the spatial structures of environmental variables and of the associated seedling and sapling communities is crucial to understanding the regeneration processes in forest communities. The degree of spatial structuring (i.e., spatial autocorrelation) of environmental and sapling community variables in the cloud fore...
Introduction: Tropical dry forests (TDF) are not only the most widespread tropical forest type but also the most threatened forest ecosystem worldwide. Yet, because their dynamics have been insufficiently studied, our knowledge about the factors responsible for the spatial and temporal variability in TDF dynamics remains very limited. In this study...
Understanding the mechanisms that allow the permanence of coral reefs and the constancy of their characteristics is necessary to alleviate the effects of chronic environmental changes. After a disturbance, healthy coral reefs display trajectories that allow regaining coral cover and the establishment of framework building corals. Through a comparat...
Abandonment of agricultural lands promotes the global expansion of secondary forests, which are critical for preserving biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services. Such roles largely depend, however, on two essential successional attributes, trajectory and recovery rate, which are expected to depend on landscape-scale forest cover in non-lin...
The recovery of soil conditions is crucial for successful ecosystem restoration and, hence, for achieving the goals of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Here, we assess how soils resist forest conversion and agricultural land use, and how soils recover during subsequent tropical forest succession on abandoned agricultural fields. Our overarch...
Successional tropical dry forest (TDF) species face water scarcity in the harsh dry season. Wood features provide insight into potential hydraulic stress coping mechanisms. Here, we describe the wood anatomy of 13 species occurring frequently in successional TDF. Given the marked rainfall seasonality of TDF, we expected these species to share consp...
As in every field of scientific research, publication of new findings is a fundamental task of botanical investigations. Since its launching in 1944, Botanical Sciences (formerly Boletín de la Sociedad Botánica de México), the scientific periodical of the Botanical Society of Mexico, has played a major role in the dissemination of botanical knowled...
Vegetation is a key biosphere component to supporting biodiversity on Earth, and its maintenance and proper functioning are essential to guarantee the well-being of humankind. From a broad perspective, a fundamental goal of vegetation ecology is to understand the roles of abiotic and biotic factors that affect vegetation structure, distribution, di...
Disturbances alter biodiversity via their specific characteristics, including severity and extent in the landscape, which act at different temporal and spatial scales. Biodiversity response to disturbance also depends on the community characteristics and habitat requirements of species. Untangling the mechanistic interplay of these factors has guid...
Advancing our current knowledge on floristic richness in Mexico requires access to different sources, including published and unpublished inventories, fascicles of ongoing floristic projects, and publicly available online databases. The evaluation of these sources reveals how extensive the information available on the country’s floristic diversity...
The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is one of the most recognized global patterns of species richness exhibited across a wide range of taxa. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed in the past two centuries to explain LDG, but rigorous tests of the drivers of LDGs have been limited by a lack of high-quality global species richness data. Here we...
1. Landscape-level disturbances, such as forest loss, can profoundly alter the functional composition and diversity of biotic assemblages. In fact, the landscape-moderated functional trait selection (LMFTS) hypothesis states that landscape-level disturbances may act as environmental filters that select a set of species with disturbance-adapted attr...
Forests that regrow naturally on abandoned fields are important for restoring biodiversity and ecosystem services, but can they also preserve the distinct regional tree floras? Using the floristic composition of 1215 early successional forests (≤20 years) in 75 human-modified landscapes across the Neotropic realm, we identified 14 distinct floristi...
Data capturing multiple axes of tree size and shape, such as a tree's stem diameter, height and crown size, underpin a wide range of ecological research - from developing and testing theory on forest structure and dynamics, to estimating forest carbon stocks and their uncertainties, and integrating remote sensing imagery into forest monitoring prog...
Tropical dry forests are environmentally complex ecosystems with highly heterogeneous water availability, such that distinctive plant communities are found in contrasting habitats in close proximity to each other. This leads to the question of how resource heterogeneity has led to functional heterogeneity among communities. One hypothesis is that t...
Background
Despite the great concern triggered by the environmental crisis worldwide, the loss of temporal key functions and processes involved in biodiversity maintenance has received little attention. Species are restricted in their life cycles by environmental variables because of their physiological and behavioral properties; thus, the timing a...
Tropical forest succession and associated changes in community composition are driven by species’ demographic rates, but how demographic strategies shift during succession remains unclear. To identify generalities in demographic trade-offs and successional shifts in demographic strategies, we quantified demographic rates of 787 tree species from tw...
The great phenological diversification characteristic of seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTF) suggests that these patterns result from a complex interplay between exogenous (e.g., climatic) and endogenous (e.g., morphological, physiological, anatomical) factors. Based on the well-established relationships of wood density with water-storing capaci...
The Usumacinta River Basin is the scenario for multiple stories. From nature's point of view, it stands out for hosting extraordinary biodiversity manifested in the complexity of its plant cover. The study of vegetation is a basic tool for designing strategies aimed to guarantee biological conservation from a sustainable standpoint. Hence, it is pa...
Resilient secondary tropical forests?
Although deforestation is rampant across the tropics, forest has a strong capacity to regrow on abandoned lands. These “secondary” forests may increasingly play important roles in biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and landscape restoration. Poorter et al . analyzed the patterns of recovery i...
Significance
Tropical forests disappear rapidly through deforestation but also have the potential to regrow naturally through a process called secondary succession. To advance successional theory, it is essential to understand how these secondary forests and their assembly vary across broad spatial scales. We do so by synthesizing continental-scale...
1. Engineering resilience, a forest’s ability to maintain its properties in the event of disturbance, comprises two components: resistance and recovery. In human‐dominated landscapes, forest resilience depends mostly on recovery. Forest recovery largely depends on autogenic regulation, which entails a negative feedback loop between rates of change...
Questions
To gain insights into the role of species-by-species replacements in cloud forest community structuring, we asked: (1) What are the effects of the spatial distribution of standing individuals on the seed rain, soil seed bank, and sapling density and survival in this cloud forest? and (2) What is the prevalence of conspecific vs. heterospe...
Background: Despite long-lasting efforts to disentangle the drivers of orchid pollination, pollination success in tropical dry forest orchids remains largely unknown.
Questions and hypothesis: How successful are pollination in three tropical dry forest orchids? How is pollination influenced by floral display and floral rewards (as suggested by flo...
1. Land-use change threatens biodiversity in tropical landscapes, but its impact on forest regeneration remains poorly known. In fact, the landscape-scale patterns driving the diversity of regenerating plants within forest fragments have been rarely explored, and we are uncertain whether such drivers vary across regions with different land-use chan...
The provision of valuable ecosystem services by tropical swamp forests (mainly carbon sequestration and storage in biomass and soil) explains their ecological importance. Current efforts toward the conservation of these ecosystems, however, face strong limitations as their spatial variation is largely unknown, particularly in regions where they occ...
Unlike well-known global patterns of plant species richness along altitudinal gradients, in the mountainous areas of the Brazilian Caatinga, species richness and diversity reach their maxima near mountain tops. The causes of this unusual pattern are not well understood, and in particular the role of edaphic factors on plant community assembly along...
Tropical forests are globally important for biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation but are being converted to other land uses. Conversion of seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTF) is particularly high while their protection is low. Secondary succession allows forests to recover their structure, diversity and composition after conve...
Wood water content, wood dry mass fraction, wood deposits and mineral inclusions separately affect wood mechanical properties, as well as plant survival and growth rates. Tree species occurring in recovering vegetation from deforestation face water stress, which is a particularly strong environmental filter in tropical dry forest regions. In this s...
Despite the ecological importance of wetland forests, their classification is still unsatisfactory, partly due to insufficient knowledge about the environmental drivers of their spatial heterogeneity. We examined the spatial variation of six community attributes in a tropical wetland forest and analyzed the underlying causes by using linear distanc...
Land-use change modifies the spatial structure of tropical landscapes, shaping global biodiversity patterns. Yet, it remains unknown how key ecological processes, such as seed dispersal, can be affected by changes in landscape patterns, and whether such effects differ among regions with different climate and disturbance intensity. We assessed the e...
Agricultural and extractive frontiers experiment rapid landscape transformation. Land-Use Sciences and Political Ecology are complementary approaches for analysing how landscape transformations are related to biophysical conditions, and socioeconomic, cultural and political processes developed at global, national and local scales. This study examin...
Environmental restrictions faced by successional species (those occurring in recovering vegetation) change gradually between early and late succession. In tropical dry forest (TDF), legume species dominate early succession, i.e. accumulate more biomass than coexisting species, but later are gradually replaced by late successional species. Stem anat...
Community nurseries within natural protected areas (NPAs) represent an attractive option to link biodiversity conservation with socioeconomic development, yet their functioning lacks proper assessment. Here, we analyse the national context of community nurseries in Mexican NPAs and suggest a specific framework to evaluate their viability. First, we...
Tropical forests are converted at an alarming rate for agricultural use and pastureland, but also regrow naturally through secondary succession. For successful forest restoration, it is essential to understand the mechanisms of secondary succession. These mechanisms may vary across forest types, but analyses across broad spatial scales are lacking....
A major obstacle faced by reforestation/restoration programs is an insufficient supply of high-quality seed. Seed collection is commonly based on opportunistic strategies that only consider availability and distance to seed sources, but not seed quality. Although for commercial timber species from temperate ecosystems the selection of individuals w...
2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. In this Letter, the middle initial of author G. J. Nabuurs was omitted, and he should have been associated with an additional affiliation: ‘Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands’ (now added as affiliation 18...
Context
Landscape structure can affect seed dispersal, but the spatial scale at which such effect is maximized (scale of effect, SoE) is unknown.
Objectives
We assessed patterns and predictors of SoE on the seed rain in two Mexican regions: the relatively well-preserved Lacandona rainforest, and the more deforested Los Tuxtlas rainforest. We hypot...
A spatially explicit global map of tree symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi reveals that climate variables are the primary drivers of the distribution of different types of symbiosis.
Old-growth tropical forests harbor an immense diversity of tree species but are rapidly being cleared, while secondary forests that regrow on abandoned agricultural lands increase in extent. We assess how tree species richness and composition recover during secondary succession across gradients in environmental conditions and anthropogenic disturba...
en Despite the recent rapid growth of tropical dry forest succession ecology, most studies on this topic have focused on plant community attribute recovery, whereas animal community successional dynamics has been largely overlooked, and the few existing studies have used taxonomic approaches. Here, we analyze the successional changes in the bee com...
Understanding the patterns and processes driving biodiversity maintenance in fragmented tropical forests is urgently needed for conservation planning, especially in species-rich forest reserves. Of particular concern are the effects that habitat modifications at the landscape scale may have on forest regeneration and ecosystem functioning – a topic...
The nutrient demands of regrowing tropical forests are partly satisfied by nitrogen-fixing legume trees, but our understanding of the abundance of those species is biased towards wet tropical regions. Here we show how the abundance of Leguminosae is affected by both recovery from disturbance and large-scale rainfall gradients through a synthesis of...
In this study we compared two alternative methodological approaches, namely moving-window metrics and surface metrics (image texture) for predicting richness of several plant groups (all species, legume species, legume trees, legume shrubs, legume forbs, legume climbers) across a tropical landscape in Mexico. We concluded that the prediction of spe...
Barkeria whartoniana is an epiphytic, microendemic orchid of southern Mexico. This species exclusively inhabits limestone outcrops within a tropical dry forest in Oaxaca State, and its current population size is very small. The goals of this study were to characterize its phorophyte preference, and to assess the success of the experimental reintrod...
With the aim of providing information for ecological restoration programs, we studied reproductive phenology and seed germination of eight species from the tropical dry forest of Morelos, Mexico. With the participation of students from the local junior high school, we monitored monthly, over one year, the production of flowers and immature and matu...
Background: La Chinantla, a topographically and geomorphologically complex region, and probably the most humid in the country, hosts a diverse but largely unknown biota, particularly at higher elevations.
Questions: How many plant species are present in La Chinantla? How are these species distributed along the elevational gradient encompassed in th...
Significance
Identifying and explaining regional differences in tropical forest dynamics, structure, diversity, and composition are critical for anticipating region-specific responses to global environmental change. Floristic classifications are of fundamental importance for these efforts. Here we provide a global tropical forest classification tha...
Tropical forests account for a quarter of the global carbon storage and a third of the terrestrial productivity. Few studies have teased apart the relative importance of environmental factors and forest attributes for ecosystem functioning, especially for the tropics. This study aims to relate aboveground biomass (AGB) and biomass dynamics (i.e., n...
Despite its importance for carbon storage and other ecosystem functions, the variation in vegetation canopy height is not yet well understood. We examined the relationship between this community attribute and environmental heterogeneity in a tropical dry forest of southern Mexico. We sampled vegetation in 15 sites along a 100-km coastal stretch of...
The understanding of how long-term environmental change affects the population dynamics of species has been a recurrent question in population ecology. Examples of such changes include land degradation, climate change, and secondary succession. In this latter process, species have been traditionally assigned to either the pioneer or the late-growth...
Shifts in dominance from coral to other benthic groups in coral reefs have raised concerns about the persistence of coral reefs and their ability to provide ecosystem services. Acute disturbances such as ship groundings offer the opportunity to examine the dynamics of successional processes in coral reefs, since understanding them is a prerequisite...
We assessed the diversity of vascular plants in the Yaxchilán Natural Monument, a nature protection area located in Chiapas State, southern Mexico. A checklist including 547 species (337 genera, 102 families) was produced by combining information derived from three sources: ( 1) an initial list derived from an ecological study on forest structure;...
The propagation in nurseries of native plant species potentially useful for agroforestry, silvopastoral and restoration programs is hindered by an inadequate supply of high quality seed. Limitations in our knowledge on the phenological patterns of native species result in the lack of efficient collecting protocols. Here we analyze the reproductive...
Background: Eruptive events in monogenetic volcanic fields create mosaics of lava fields that result in different successional times and stages, and environmental conditions. Such geomorphological heterogeneity may be related to patterns of vegetation structure, diversity, and composition across a landscape.
Aim: To examine landscape-scale effects...
The propagation in nurseries of native plant species potentially useful for agroforestry, silvopastoral and
restoration programs is hindered by an inadequate supply of high quality seed. Limitations in our knowledge
on the phenological patterns of native species result in the lack of efficient collecting protocols. Here
we analyze the reproductive...
The magnitude of the carbon sink in second-growth forests is expected to vary with successional biomass dynamics resulting from tree growth, recruitment, and mortality, and with the effects of climate on these dynamics. We compare aboveground biomass dynamics of dry and wet Neotropical forests, based on monitoring data gathered over 3–16 years in f...
