Rebecca J. Cole

Natural Systems Research

Soil and litter arthropods represent a large proportion of tropical biodiversity and perform important ecosystem functions, but little is known about the efficacy of different tropical forest restoration strategies in facilitating their recovery in degraded habitats. We sampled arthropods in four 7- to 8-year-old restoration treatments and in nearb...

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...

Litterfall and litter decomposition are key elements of nutrient cycling in tropical forests, a process in which decomposer communities such as macro‐arthropods play a critical role. Understanding the rate and extent to which ecosystem function and biodiversity recover during succession is useful to managing the growing area of tropical successiona...

Applied nucleation, mostly based upon planting tree islands, has been proposed as a cost‐effective strategy to meet ambitious global forest and landscape restoration targets. We review results from a 15‐year study, replicated at 15 sites in southern Costa Rica, that compares applied nucleation to natural regeneration and mixed‐species tree plantati...

Costa Rica implemented the world's first national-scale Payment for Ecosystem Service (PES) program in 1996 and now protects over 200,000 hectares. By distributing wealth towards local land-stewards, Costa Rica's program has helped to limit deforestation at a national scale, but the large-scale ecological implications have yet remained unclear. Her...

Non-native ungulates (sheep, goats, and pigs) have significant negative impacts on ecosystem biodiversity, structure, and biogeochemical function throughout the Pacific Islands. Elevated nitrogen (N) availability associated with ungulate disturbance has been shown to promote the success of resource-exploitive invasive plants. While ungulate removal...

With increased interest in forest restoration comes an urgent need to provide accurate, scalable, and cost-effective monitoring tools. The ubiquity of smartphones has led to a surge in monitoring apps. We reviewed and assessed monitoring apps found through web searches and conversations with practitioners. We identified 42 apps that (1) automatical...

Protecting and restoring biodiversity requires that nature becomes the economically sustainable option for local communities across the globe. Here, we present Restor, a data sharing platform developed to facilitate this process by providing transparency and connectivity to nature-based solutions. In the process, Restor provides a unique database t...

Applying nutrient‐rich agricultural by‐products, such as fruit peels and pulp, to degraded land has been proposed as a strategy to overcome a number of barriers to tropical forest recovery. While such linkages between agroindustry and restoration represent win–win scenarios, practical applications remain largely unexplored. In this case study, we t...

Nonnative invasive plants often outcompete native species under high resource availability. Restoration techniques that lower resources may, therefore, create favorable conditions for resource conservative native species over resource exploitative invasive species. Research on this topic has focused on temperate grass and forb‐dominated ecosystems,...

Reducing soil nutrient availability has been proposed as a strategy to favor native vs. non‐native invasive plant species and represents a potential alternative to traditional manual removal or chemical control methods. We implemented a field experiment in invaded dry and wet montane Hawaiian ecosystems to test responses of soil and dominant plant...

In Huascarán National Park (HNP), Peru, grazing and anthropogenic burning have been interacting for decades with natural ignitions and climate variability to reconfigure the fire regimes of the vegetative communities. However, over the last few decades, human alterations to the region’s fire regime were perceived by resource managers to have led to...

Conservation and restoration of ecosystems impacted by nonnative ungulates increasingly involves their removal and exclusion. While the influence of nonnative ungulate removal on plant communities is commonly monitored, impacts on underlying ecological processes are seldom quantified. Here we examined how nonnative feral pig (Sus scrofa) removal fr...

Distributions of foliar nutrients across forest canopies can give insight into their plant functional diversity and improve our understanding of biogeochemical cycling. We used airborne remote sensing and Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) to quantify canopy foliar nitrogen (N) across ~164 km2 of wet lowland tropical forest in the Osa Peninsul...

While tropical forests play a critical role in global carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles, how their biogeochemical dynamics will respond to changes in climate, especially warming, is uncertain. To shed light on links between climate and N cycling in tropical forests, we measured bulk surface soil C and N concentrations and isotopic content at 40 fo...

While tropical forests play a critical role in global carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles, how their biogeochemical dynamics will respond to changes in climate, especially warming, is uncertain. To shed light on links between climate and N cycling in tropical forests, we measured bulk surface soil C and N concentrations and isotopic content at 40 fo...

Table S1. Elevation and site use history. Table S2. Abundance within orders for litter samples (individuals m−2) and pitfall samples (individuals/trap) in each habitat type (N = 4). Table S3. Arthropod functional diversity density per m2 for litter samples and per trap for pitfall samples in four habitat types. Table S4. PERMANOVA analysis resul...

Soil and litter arthropods represent a large proportion of tropical biodiversity and perform important ecosystem functions, but little is known about the efficacy of different tropical forest restoration strategies in facilitating their recovery in degraded habitats. We sampled arthropods in four 7- to 8-year-old restoration treatments and in nearb...

Tropical rainforests are reservoirs of terrestrial carbon and biodiversity. Large and often emergent trees store disproportionately large amounts of aboveground carbon and greatly influence the structure and functioning of tropical rainforests. Despite their importance, controls on the abundance and distribution of emergent trees are largely unknow...

Tropical forests store large amounts of carbon in tree biomass, although the environmental controls on forest carbon stocks remain poorly resolved. Emerging airborne remote sensing techniques offer a powerful approach to understand how aboveground carbon density (ACD) varies across tropical landscapes. In this study, we evaluate the accuracy of the...

Glaciers in the tropical Andes have been rapidly losing mass since the 1970s. In addition to the documented increase in temperature, increases in light-absorbing particles deposited on glaciers could be contributing to the observed glacier loss. Here we report on measurements of light-absorbing particles sampled from glaciers during three surveys i...

Glaciers in the tropical Andes have been rapidly losing mass since the 1970s. In addition to the documented increase in air temperature, increases in light absorbing particulates deposited on glaciers could be contributing to the observed glacier loss. Here we report on measurements of light absorbing particulates sampled from glaciers during three...

Globally, non-native ungulates threaten native biodiversity, alter biotic and abiotic factors regulating ecological processes, and incur significant economic costs via herbivory, rooting, and trampling. Removal of non-native ungulates is an increasingly common and crucial first step in conserving and restoring native forests. However, removal is of...

Enrichment planting in naturally recovering secondary forests or in tree plantations is increasingly being used as strategy to restore later-successional, large-seeded tropical forest trees. We seeded two tree species (Otoba novogranatensis and Ruagea glabra) in three agricultural sites in Southern Costa Rica: abandoned pastures, eight to ten year...

Enrichment planting in naturally recovering secondary forests or in tree plantations is increasingly being used as strategy to restore later-successional, large-seeded tropical forest trees. We seeded two tree species ( Otoba novogranatensis and Ruagea glabra) in three agricultural sites in Southern Costa Rica: abandoned pastures, eight to ten year...

Background/Question/Methods Old growth tropical rainforests play a large role in the global carbon (C) cycle by storing about 350 Pg C in aboveground tree biomass, a reservoir that is shrinking due to widespread forest clearing and degradation. A shifting climate may also cause substantial changes in intact forest C stocks. And yet, our understan...

Seed dispersal often limits tropical forest regeneration and animals disperse most rainforest tree seeds. This presents two important questions for restoration ecologists: (1) which animals are common seed dispersers? and (2) which restoration techniques attract them? Fourteen restoration sites were planted with four tree species in three designs,...

Active forest restoration typically involves planting trees over large areas; this practice is costly, however, and establishing homogeneous plantations may favour the recruitment of a particular suite of species and strongly influence the successional trajectory. An alternative approach is to plant nuclei (islands) of trees to simulate the nucleat...

Background / Purpose: Nonnative feral pigs are an exotic disturbance agent that alters native ecosystems on six continents and many oceanic islands. There is little information, however, on the extent and rate of native plant community recovery following feral pig removal, particularly across a range of sites and at regional scales. We examined u...

Background/Question/Methods Nonnative feral pigs (Sus scrofa; wild boar) are an exotic disturbance agent that alters native ecosystems on six continents and many oceanic islands. Feral pigs degrade native vegetation and facilitate invasion by nonnative plants via browsing, rooting, and trampling. Hawaiian forests are thought to be particularly vul...

Nonnative ungulates can alter the structure and function of forest ecosystems. Feral pigs in particular pose a substantial threat to native plant communities throughout their global range. Hawaiian forests are exceptionally vulnerable to feral pig activity because native vegeta-tion evolved in the absence of large mammalian herbivores. A common app...

Tropical land cover change has negatively affected numerous migratory bird populations. Forest restoration can augment migrant wintering habitat. However, almost no information exists about factors that influence migrant use of tropical restoration sites. We sampled migrant birds in young restoration sites in Costa Rica from February 2006 to April...

Estrategias de restauración tienen el potencial de acelerar el restablecimiento del ciclo de nutrientes en áreas degradadas. En este estudio, se evaluó la producción de hojarasca, su acumulación y descomposición bajo tres tratamientos: plantación (toda la superficie plantada); islas (árboles sembrados en parches de tres tamaños) y testigo (regenera...

Tropical forest restoration strategies have the potential to accelerate the recovery of the nutrient cycles in degraded lands. Litter production and its decomposition represent the main transfer of organic material and nutrients into the soil substrate. We evaluated litter production, accumulation on the forest floor, and its decomposition under th...

Background/Question/Methods Nonnative feral pigs (Sus scrofa) drastically alter native vegetation and terrestrial ecosystems by browsing, rooting, and trampling, and may also facilitate invasion by nonnative plants. Feral pigs are particularly problematic in geographically isolated areas such as islands. Hawaiian wet forests are thought to be par...

Planting tree seedlings in small patches (islands) has been proposed as a method to facilitate forest recovery that is less expensive than planting large areas and better simulates the nucleation process of recovery. We planted seedlings of four tree species at 12 formerly agricultural sites in southern Costa Rica in two designs: plantation (entire...

In degraded tropical pastures, active restoration strategies have the potential to facilitate forest regrowth at rates that are faster than natural recovery, enhancing litterfall, and nutrient inputs to the forest floor. We evaluated litterfall and nutrient dynamics under four treatments: plantation (entire area planted), tree islands (planting in...

Natural regeneration of large-seeded, late-successional trees in fragmented tropical landscapes can be strongly limited by a lack of seed dispersal resulting in the need for more intensive restoration approaches, such as enrichment planting, to include these species in future forests. Direct seeding may be an alternative low-cost approach to planti...

Planting native tree seedlings is the predominant restoration strategy for accelerating forest succession on degraded lands. Planting tree "islands" is less costly and labor intensive than establishing larger plantations and simulates the nucleation process of succession. Assessing the role of island size in attracting seed dispersers, the potentia...

Agroforestry on small-scale farms has potential to provide important ecological services, such as carbon sequestration and maintenance of biological diversity, while also providing on-farm products for domestic use and marketing. Payments for environmental services (PES) are an increasingly popular mechanism for encouraging production of ecological...

Planting tree seedlings is a common strategy to facilitate tropical forest recovery, but it is resource intensive. Planting trees in small patches or "island" as a restoration strategy (Zahawi and Augspurger 2006, Cole et al., forthcoming) imitates the nucleation process that occurs naturally over longer time scales from random dispersal events. Mo...

Background/Question/Methods Planting tree seedlings is the predominant restoration strategy to facilitate tropical forest recovery after agricultural use. Planting seedlings in patches or “islands” rather than plantations simulates the nucleation process of succession and is less costly, but the biological effectiveness of this strategy has rarely...

Variation in postdispersal seed fate is an important factor driving patterns of forest regeneration. Because most previous studies have not tracked final seed fate and have commonly equated seed removal with predation without considering the possibility of secondary dispersal, little is known about individual seed mortality factors in successional...

This paper covers the average instrument comparison between the 2DC and replicator for some 40 time intervals of duration 10 seconds each, and represents the entire project. Figures 1 and 2 show the average size spectra obtained with the replicator and 2DC for different temperature groupings. Note that the replicator shows considerably more crystal...