Maria C Ruiz-Jaen

Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) · Forestry

• Linking tree diversity to carbon storage can provide further motivation to conserve tropical forests and to design carbon-enriched plantations. Here, we examine the role of tree diversity and functional traits in determining carbon storage in a mixed-species plantation and in a natural tropical forest in Panama. • We used species richness, functi...

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) is likely to be central to a post-Kyoto climate change mitigation agreement. As such, identifying conditions and factors that will shape the success or failure of a reduced deforestation scheme will provide important insights for policy planning. Given that protected...

Forests are of major importance to human society, contributing several crucial ecosystem services. Biodiversity is suggested to positively influence multiple services but evidence from natural systems at scales relevant to management is scarce. Here, across a scale of 400,000 km(2), we report that tree species richness in production forests shows p...

The criteria of restoration success should be clearly estab- lished to evaluate restoration projects. Recently, the Soci- ety of Ecological Restoration International (SER) has produced a Primer that includes ecosystem attributes that should be considered when evaluating restoration success. To determine how restoration success has been evaluated in...

Estimating α‐diversity and species distributions provide baseline information to understand factors such as biodiversity loss and erosion of ecosystem services. Yet, species surveys typically cover a small portion of any country's landmass. Public, global databases could help, but contain biases. Thus, the magnitude of bias should be identified and...

Net primary productivity (NPP) is one of the most important parameters in describing the functioning of any ecosystem and yet it arguably remains a poorly quantified and understood component of carbon cycling in tropical forests, especially outside of the Americas. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of NPP and its carbon allocation to wood...

1. Plant functional traits, in particular specific leaf area (SLA), wood density and seed mass, are often good predictors of individual tree growth rates within communities. Individuals and species with high SLA, low wood density and small seeds tend to have faster growth rates. 2. If community-level relationships between traits and growth have gen...

Supplementary Figures S1-S3 and Supplementary Tables S1-S6

The conversion of tropical montane cloud forest (TMCF) to pastures and agricultural lands has been an important activity in this life zone for many years. Although forest clearing and grazing continues, in some areas, changing political, economic, and social drivers have led to the abandonment of marginal areas. These dynamics provide an excellent...

A trade-off between growth and mortality rates characterizes tree species in closed canopy forests. This trade-off is maintained by inherent differences among species and spatial variation in light availability caused by canopy-opening disturbances. We evaluated conditions under which the trade-off is expressed and relationships with four key funct...

Many experimental studies show that a decline in species number has a negative effect on ecosystem function, however less is known about this pattern in natural communities. We examined the relative importance of environment, space, and diversity on ecosystem function, specifically tree carbon storage in four plant types (understory/canopy; trees/p...

Background/Question/Methods Experimental studies assessing the role of diversity in ecosystem functioning manipulated diversity level to measure the response of selected ecosystem function. However, in the natural forest, such direct manipulation of diversity is not possible. To address this issue, we used stratified random sampling to create diffe...

Rapid urban growth has increased the importance of restoring degraded vegetation patches within these areas. In this study, we reforested a site that was previously dominated by exotic grasses within an urban area. The goal of this study was to evaluate restoration success in a reforested site using four variables of vegetation structure, five grou...

Most restoration projects have focused on recovery of vegetation to assess restoration success. Nevertheless if the goal of a restoration project is to create an ecosystem that is self-supporting and resilient to perturbation, we also need information on the recovery of other trophic levels and ecosystem processes. To provide an example on how to a...

Abtract Restoration success was measured in a reforested karst valley in Puerto Rico. The success was determined by assessing the recovery of ecological integrity. This measure comprises: structural complexity, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes. The measures of structural complexity included grass cover, litter layers, foliage layers, and basal...