skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 10:00 PM ET on Thursday, February 12 until 1:00 AM ET on Friday, February 13 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: The First 100 Years of Research on Barro Colorado: Plant and Ecosystem Science (Volumes 1 and 2)
The Barro Colorado Nature Monument in Panama, which includes Barro Colorado Island and nearby mainland peninsulas, supports the best studied tropical forest in the world. This 98-chapter edited volume reviews the history and contributions of research undertaken at this moist tropical forest to advance our understanding of tropical plants and ecosystems. The first section describes the setting, including soils, land use history, forest structure, and plant species composition. Nine additional sections concern plant reproduction and seedling regeneration, plant physiology, plant community ecology, population genetics, interactions with microbes and herbivores, remote sensing, observational ecosystem studies, experimental ecosystem studies, and focal taxa and functional group accounts. The authoritative reviews in this volume provide a foundation for future research in this and other tropical forest sites.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2325527 1754668
PAR ID:
10623854
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press
Date Published:
ISBN:
978-1-944466-71-8
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. (, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute)
    Metadata describing seed germination and seed mass surveys conducted at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The metadata includes detailed descriptions of methods and definitions of variables in accompanying data files. The accompanying data files are supplements 4, 5, and 6. The source reference follows: Garwood, N. C. 2024. Chapter 18 - An Expanded Survey of Seed Germination for Barro Colorado Island. In The First 100 Years of Research on Barro Colorado: Plant and Ecosystem Science, ed. H. C. Muller-Landau and S. J. Wright: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Washington, DC. 
    more » « less
  2. (, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute)
    Four annotated examples that explain how to interpret records in the full data set for the seed germination survey conducted at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Supplement 1 describes methods and provides variable definitions. Supplement 1 can be found here: https://doi.org/10.25573/data.22801958.v1The source reference follows: Garwood, N. C. 2024. Chapter 18 - An Expanded Survey of Seed Germination for Barro Colorado Island. In The First 100 Years of Research on Barro Colorado: Plant and Ecosystem Science, ed. H. C. Muller-Landau and S. J. Wright: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Washington, DC. 
    more » « less
  3. ; (, Global change biology)
    null (Ed.)
    Many tropical regions are experiencing an intensification of drought, with increasing severity and frequency of the events. However, the forest ecosystem response to these changes is still highly uncertain. It has been hypothesized that on short time scales (from diurnal to seasonal), tropical forests respond to water stress by physiological controls, such as stomata regulation and phenological adjustment, to control increasing atmospheric water demand and cope with reduced water supply. However, the interactions among biological processes and co-varying environmental factors that determine the ecosystem-level fluxes are still unclear. Furthermore, climate variability at longer time scales, such as that generated by ENSO, produces less predictable effects, which might vary among forests and ecoregions within the tropics. This study will present some emerging patterns of response to water stress from five years of observations of water, carbon, and energy fluxes on the seasonal tropical forest in Barro Colorado Island (Panama), including an increase in productivity during the 2015 El Niño. We will show how these responses will depend critically on the combination of environmental factors experienced by the forest along the seasonal cycle. These results suggest a critical role of plant hydraulics in mediating the response to water stress on a broad range of temporal scales, including during the wet seasons when water availability is not a limiting factor. The study also found that the response to large-scale drought events is contingent and might produce a different outcome in different tropical forest areas. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; (, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems)
    Abstract Tropical forest diversity governs forest structures, compositions, and influences the ecosystem response to environmental changes. Better representation of forest diversity in ecosystem demography (ED) models within Earth system models is thus necessary to accurately capture and predict how tropical forests affect Earth system dynamics subject to climate changes. However, achieving forest coexistence in ED models is challenging due to their computational expense and limited understanding of the mechanisms governing forest functional diversity. This study applies the advanced Multi‐Objective Population‐based Parallel Local Surrogate‐assisted search (MOPLS) optimization algorithm to simultaneously calibrate ecosystem fluxes and coexistence of two physiologically distinct tropical forest species in a size‐ and age‐structured ED model with realistic representation of wood harvest. MOPLS exhibits satisfactory model performance, capturing hydrological and biogeochemical dynamics observed in Barro Colorado Island, Panama, and robustly achieving coexistence for the two representative forest species. This demonstrates its effectiveness in calibrating tropical forest coexistence. The optimal solution is applied to investigate the recovery trajectories of forest biomass after various intensities of clear‐cut deforestation. We find that a 20% selective logging can take approximately 40 years for aboveground biomass to return to the initial level. This is due to the slow recovery rate of late successional trees, which only increases by 4% over the 40‐year period. This study lays the foundation to calibrate coexistence in ED models. MOPLS can be an effective tool to help better represent tropical forest diversity in Earth system models and inform forest management practices. 
    more » « less
  5. (, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute)
    Supplement 6 - The full data set for a seed mass survey conducted at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The full data set is included twice in comma and tab delimited formats. Supplement 1 Table J describes all fields in Supplement 6. Supplement 1 Tables K through N describe codes for information included in each field of Supplement 6. Supplement 1 can be found here: https://doi.org/10.25573/data.22801958 The source reference follows: Garwood, N. C. 2023. An Expanded Survey of Seed Germination for Barro Colorado Island. In The First 100 Years of Research on Barro Colorado Island: Plant and Ecosystem Science, ed. H. C. Muller-Landau and S. J. Wright: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Washington, DC. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Text Encoded Conversion
  • XML
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email