Collaborative Research: LTREB: A natural laboratory for studying biodiversity, ecosystem function, and responses to environmental change from Amazonian lowlands to Andean treeline

Wake Forest University, Winston Salem NC

Investigators

Abstract

Where a species lives - its geographic range - is affected by climate and the interactions it has with other living organisms. There is a complex set of factors that influence species ranges, and how these factors change with respect to changing environments depends on the life history stage of long-lived organisms, such as trees. Range shifts in plants that occur through differential mortality versus recruitment are complex processes, requiring long term data on the demography of both adults and the early stages of development for proper predictive modelling. This research replaces descriptive studies with a mechanistic understanding of species and ecosystem responses to environmental changes along elevation gradients by combining long-term field data with state-of-the-art demographic and environmental modeling. The results will advance our understanding of species range shifts, which is important to land managers and species conservation efforts. The study will also train US undergraduate and graduate students in STEM disciplines, and advance K-12 education. This research advances mechanistic knowledge of species- and ecosystem-level responses to environmental changes based on structural and chemical functional traits. Data gathered from field plots are coupled with advanced demographic modelling and airborne and satellite remote sensing to understand how the environment controls tropical forest species distributions, community composition, and ecosystem ecology. The research approach couples a large, traditional data set of forest plot inventories, which includes high precision and high temporal resolution growth and mortality data, with meteorology, structural and chemical traits, and remote sensing. A series of hypotheses centered on linking vital rates to species responses to ongoing and episodic environmental variability, as well as scaling individual species responses to ecosystem performance and function will be addressed with this research. The research centers on questions of tree distributional ecology, demography, and forest ecosystem ecology requiring long time-series to understand effects of ongoing environmental change and to detect responses to transient environmental change. Mechanistic answers to these questions in systems of long-lived organisms, such as trees, require understanding variation in vital rates conditional on environmental variables, which in turn require long time periods for accurate estimation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.