Michiel van Breugel

Yale-NUS College -- http://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/ · Sciences

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 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...

Context Tropical forest loss has a major impact on climate change. Secondary forest growth has potential to mitigate these impacts, but uncertainty regarding future land use, remote sensing limitations, and carbon model accuracy have inhibited understanding the range of potential future carbon dynamics. Objectives We evaluated the effects of four...

Finding suitable tree species that not only grow well on nutrient poor soils but are also safe financial investments is one of the major obstacles to successful reforestation efforts in the tropics. Our study compared the financial viability and growth of valuable timber species in monocultures and mixtures on infertile soils. Our work shows the ex...

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...

Identifying generalisable processes that underpin population dynamics is crucial for understanding successional patterns. While longitudinal or chronosequence data are powerful tools for doing so, the traditional focus on community-level shifts in taxonomic and functional composition rather than species-level trait–demography relationships has made...

Young successional tropical forests are crucial in the global carbon cycle because they can quickly sequester large quantities of atmospheric carbon. However, lianas (woody vines) can significantly decrease biomass accumulation in young regenerating forests. Lianas are abundant in tropical dry forests, and thus we hypothesized that lianas reduce bi...

Significance Symbiotic dinitrogen (N 2 )-fixing trees fulfill a critical function in tropical forests by bringing in new nitrogen, yet it remains unclear how they overcome constraints by highly weathered, nutrient-poor tropical soils. We advance forest biogeochemistry and microbial ecology with the discovery from field trials in Panama that fast-gr...

Grasses and fire pose a major challenge for forest restoration. Here we evaluate a case study of reforestation in an area invaded by the tall invasive grass Saccharum spontaneum in the Panama Canal Watershed. The project objectives were to (1) replace Saccharum with a forest, (2) restore a stratified mixed species forest and (3) sequester carbon. W...

Early successional tropical forests could mitigate climate change via rapid accumulation of atmospheric carbon. However, liana (woody vine) abundance and biomass has been increasing in many tropical forests over the past decades, which may slow the speed at which secondary forests accumulate biomass. Lianas decrease biomass accumulation in tropical...

1.Understanding how functional traits moderate species’ demographic responses along environmental gradients is a core pursuit in ecology, often to predict how species abundances will respond to a rapidly changing environment. The latter necessitates species demography, or at least abundance, to be modelled directly as a response; yet most studies t...

A major uncertainty in the land carbon cycle is whether symbiotic nitrogen fixation acts to enhance the tropical forest carbon sink. Nitrogen-fixing trees can supply vital quantities of the growth-limiting nutrient nitrogen, but the extent to which the resulting carbon–nitrogen feedback safeguards ecosystem carbon sequestration remains unclear. We...

Almost half of lowland tropical forests are at various stages of regeneration following deforestation or fragmentation. Changes in tree communities along successional gradients have predictable bottom‐up effects on consumers. Liana (woody vine) assemblages also change with succession, but their effects on animal succession remain unexplored. Here w...

1.Edaphic factors and initial conditions can regulate the speed of forest succession. Edaphic factors, which include soil chemistry and topography, determine soil resource availability and can filter species as forests mature. Initial plant cover early in succession can determine the rates at which secondary forests change in structure, richness, b...

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....

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...

1.Soil resource partitioning and dispersal limitation have been shown to shape the tree community structure of mature tropical forests, but are poorly studied in the context of forest succession. We examined the relative contributions of both ecological processes to the variation in the species composition of young tropical secondary forests at dif...

Reforestation in the tropics mitigates the negative effects of climate change by sequestering carbon in biomass.However, tree growth is limited by nutrient availability in many tropical regions. A clear understanding ofnutrient constraints and topography on growth of native timber species is thus essential to improve both theeconomic return on refor...

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...

A fundamental biogeochemical paradox is that nitrogen-rich tropical forests contain abundant nitrogen-fixing trees, which support a globally significant tropical carbon sink. One explanation for this pattern holds that nitrogen-fixing trees can overcome phosphorus limitation in tropical forests by synthesizing phosphatase enzymes to acquire soil or...

Question(s) Successional shifts in biodiversity are key drivers of the recovery of ecosystem functioning following disturbances. Identifying mechanisms that enhance or limit the ecological processes that drive these successional patterns can strengthen efforts to manage biodiversity‐dependent ecosystem functions across human‐dominated landscapes. H...

Conversion of tropical forests to crop lands and pastures has been an on-going issue in the Neotropics for decades. Despite the fact that international agreements and incentives have tried to encourage the reforestation of degraded lands in developing countries, in Panama, the actual area reforested has been limited. One of the reasons is that one...

Mechanisms of community assembly and ecosystem function are often analyzed using community-weighted mean trait values (CWMs). We present a novel conceptual framework to quantify the contribution of demographic processes (i.e., growth, recruitment, and mortality) to temporal changes in CWMs. We used this framework to analyze mechanisms of secondary...

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...

Secondary forests are important carbon sinks, but their biomass dynamics vary markedly within and across landscapes. The biotic and abiotic drivers of this variation are still not well understood. We tested the effects of soil resource availability and competition by lianas on the biomass dynamics of young secondary tropical forests in Panama and a...

Remote sensing is increasingly needed to meet the critical demand for estimates of forest structure and composition at landscape to continental scales. Hyperspectral images can detect tree canopy properties, including species identity, leaf chemistry and disease. Tree growth rates are related to these measurable canopy properties but whether growth...

available at: http://www.stri.si.edu/smartreforestation/ This “Watershed White Paper” employs the latest research to explain the fundamental processes supporting natural capital and producing watershed related ecosystem services in a key region of Latin America and the Caribbean. It summarizes the current thinking on watershed economics and confr...

Version interactivo: http://www.stri.si.edu/smartreforestation/ Este "Libro Blanco de la Cuenca del Canal" emplea las más recientes investigaciones para explicar los procesos fundamentales, apoyando el capital natural y la producción de servicios de los ecosistemas relacionados a las cuencas en una región clave de América Latina y el Caribe. Resu...

https://publications.iadb.org/handle/11319/7233 Este "Libro Blanco de la Cuenca del Canal" emplea las más recientes investigaciones para explicar los procesos fundamentales, apoyando el capital natural y la producción de servicios de los ecosistemas relacionados a las cuencas en una región clave de América Latina y el Caribe. Resume las ideas act...

Regrowth of tropical secondary forests following complete or nearly complete removal of forest vegetation actively stores carbon in aboveground biomass, partially counterbalancing carbon emissions from deforestation, forest degradation, burning of fossil fuels, and other anthropogenic sources. We estimate the age and spatial extent of lowland secon...

Land-use change occurs nowhere more rapidly than in the tropics, where the imbalance between deforestation and forest regrowth has large consequences for the global carbon cycle. However, considerable uncertainty remains about the rate of biomass recovery in secondary forests, and how these rates are influenced by climate, landscape, and prior land...

Lianas (woody vines) can have profound effects on tree recruitment, growth, survival, and diversity in tropical forests. However, the dynamics of liana colonization soon after land abandonment are poorly understood, and thus it is unknown whether lianas alter tree regeneration early in succession. We examined the liana community in 43 forests that...

This publication represents a synthesis of themes discussed in the following conference "Watershed Management for Ecosystem Services in Human Dominated Landscapes of the Neotropics" and includes recent research and practices related to watershed management in the region. It provides a biophysical understanding of ecosystem function for key land use...

1.Successional gradients are ubiquitous in nature, yet few studies have systematically examined the evolutionary origins of taxa that specialize at different successional stages. Here we quantify successional habitat specialization in Neotropical forest trees and evaluate its evolutionary lability along a precipitation gradient. Theoretically, succ...

Significance Although forest succession has been approached as a predictable process, successional trajectories vary widely, even among nearby stands with similar environmental conditions and disturbance histories. We quantified predictability and uncertainty during tropical forest succession using dynamical models describing the interactions among...

Adaptations to resource availability strongly shape patterns of community composition along successional gradients in environmental conditions. In the present study, we examined the extent to which variation in functional composition explains shifts in trait-based functional strategies in young tropical secondary forests during the most dynamic sta...

Understanding how plants are constructed—i.e., how key size dimensions and the amount of mass invested in different tissues varies among individuals—is essential for modeling plant growth, carbon stocks, and energy fluxes in the terrestrial biosphere. Allocation patterns can differ through ontogeny, but also among coexisting species and among speci...

Understanding how plants are constructed—i.e., how key size dimensions and the amount of mass invested in different tissues varies among individuals—is essential for modeling plant growth, carbon stocks, and energy fluxes in the terrestrial biosphere. Allocation patterns can differ through ontogeny, but also among coexisting species and among speci...

Understanding how plants are constructed; i.e., how key size dimensions and the amount of mass invested in different tissues varies among individuals; is essential for modeling plant growth, estimating carbon stocks, and mapping energy fluxes in the terrestrial biosphere. Allocation patterns can differ through ontogeny, but also among coexisting sp...

Countries in eastern Africa have set aside significant proportions of their land for protection. But are these areas representative of the diverse range of species and habitats found in the region? And do conservation efforts include areas where the state of biodiversity is likely to deteriorate without further interventions? Various studies have a...

Both local- and landscape-scale processes drive succession of secondary forests in human-modified tropical landscapes. Nonetheless, until recently successional changes in composition and diversity have been predominantly studied at the patch level. Here, we used a unique dataset with 45 randomly selected sites across a mixed-use tropical landscape...

1. Deterministic theories predict that local communities assemble from a regional species pool based on niche differences, thus by plant functional adaptations. We tested whether functional traits can also explain patterns in species dominance among the suite of co-occurring species. 2. We predicted that along a gradient of secondary succession the...

Secondary forests are rapidly expanding in tropical regions. Yet, despite the importance of understanding the hydrological consequences of land-cover dynamics, the relationship between forest succession and canopy interception is poorly understood. This lack of knowledge is unfortunate because rainfall interception plays an important role in region...

Forests contribute a significant portion of the land carbon sink, but their ability to sequester CO2 may be constrained by nitrogen, a major plant-limiting nutrient. Many tropical forests possess tree species capable of fixing atmospheric dinitrogen (N2), but it is unclear whether this functional group can supply the nitrogen needed as forests reco...

High fidelity carbon mapping has the potential to greatly advance national resource management and to encourage international action toward climate change mitigation. However, carbon inventories based on field plots alone cannot capture the heterogeneity of carbon stocks, and thus remote sensing-assisted approaches are critically important to carbo...

Large scale forest regrowth is one aspect of modern land-cover change. Yet, despite the importance of understanding the hydrological consequences of land cover dynamics, the relation between forest succession and canopy interception is poorly understood. This lack of knowledge is unfortunate because rainfall interception plays an important role in...

Rainfall interception by forest canopies reduces the water influx to the forest floor. When forests are replaced by pasture, the process of canopy interception temporarily stops until a new forest develops on abandoned pasture land. Modern land-cover change typically involves regrowing forests but the relation between forest succession and canopy i...

Many studies conclude that light is the most important resource that determines plant performance of tree saplings in tropical rain forests, and implicitly suggest that soil resources are less important. To provide a quantitative test for soil versus light effects on sapling performance, we studied how saplings of the shade-tolerant tree species Br...

Competition between neighboring plants plays a major role in the population dynamics of tree species in the early phases of humid tropical forest succession. We evaluated the relative importance of above- versus below-ground competition during the first years of old-field succession on soil with low fertility in Southern Mexico, using the premise t...

Background/Question/Methods Tropical forests are globally important sinks of atmospheric carbon, but their sustained function depends on how carbon uptake is influenced by the nitrogen cycle. Symbiotic fixers are common, rich in species, and capable of fixing large quantities of N2 in tropical forests, but we know little about whether and when fi...

Background/Question/Methods Functional traits delineate important dimensions of ecological variation in plant communities and, in doing so, reveal mechanisms that drive ecological processes. In tropical secondary forests, changes in species composition during succession have been well documented and are assumed to reflect shifts in adaptive ecolo...

The phylogenetic structure of communities can reveal forces shaping community assembly, but the vast majority of work on phylogenetic community structure has been conducted in mature ecosystems. Here, we present an analysis of the phylogenetic structure of three Neotropical rain forest communities undergoing succession. In each site, the net relate...