Project title:
Quantifying landscape-level variation in tropical forest structure, function, and composition and their change over time
Mentor name:
Helene Muller-Landau, Senior Scientist
https://striresearch.si.edu/quantitative-forest-ecology/
Location of internship:
Barro Colorado Island, Panama, and/or Gamboa, Panama
Project summary and objectives:
Tropical forests vary widely in their structure, function, and composition, variation that is associated with climate, soils, geomorphology, land use history, and biogeographic realm. Forest structure encompasses the horizontal and vertical distribution of vegetation, which depends on the abundances, spatial arrangement, and morphology of trees and lianas (woody vines) of different forms and sizes. Forest function refers to the ecological roles of forests, including carbon storage, woody productivity, photosynthesis, evapotranspiration, and nutrient cycling, among others. By forest composition, we mean which species with what traits and abundances are present in an area; we focus especially on woody plant functional composition and diversity, as well as woody plant species composition and diversity.
A mechanistic understanding of this variation is crucial to accurately predicting the future of tropical forests under changing climates, disturbance regimes, and nutrient deposition. The high plant diversity of tropical forests offers the potential for high resilience to anthropogenic global change because species vary widely in their responses to environmental variation and the most negatively affected species will invariably become less common. However, this very diversity presents a tremendous challenge to our ability to understand tropical forest function today and to predict how it will respond to global change, as it means an understanding of compositional variation among forests and functional variation among species is critical.
This project aims to improve our understanding of patterns, causes, and consequences of landscape-scale variation in tropical forest structure, function, and woody plant composition, and how they are changing (or not) over time. The specific objectives are the following:
· Contribute to the development of methods to quantify tropical forest structure, function, and composition over large areas using ground-based, drone-based, airborne, and satellite remote sensing.
· Quantify variation in forest structure, function, and composition in Panama at high spatial and temporal resolution over large areas.
· Investigate how spatial variation in forest structure, function, and composition relate to each other and to soils, climate, topography, stand age, and other factors.
· Evaluate temporal variation in forest structure, function, and composition and its relation to climate cycles and trends, disturbance timing and intensity, anthropogenic influences, and other hypothesized drivers.
Skills required
The ideal candidate has a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, ability to conduct tropical forest field work in rugged terrain, strong organizational skills, ability to work well with team members from diverse backgrounds, strong quantitative skills including programming experience, strong English oral and written communication skills, and good Spanish communication skills.
