Abstract
Environmental gradients have played a pivotal role in the history and development of plant ecology and are useful for testing ecological and evolutionary theory. Área de Conservación Guanacaste is a spatio-temporal mosaic of forests that have evolved continuously across elevation, topography, soil types, succession, and annual and inter-annual climatic change. Studies of plant ecology across diverse gradients of ACG have shaped functional ecology, successional theory, community assembly, plant–herbivore interactions, among many other fields. In this review, we synthesize the, perhaps overlooked, role plant ecological studies of ACG have had on our understanding of tropical forest dynamics. We outline present-day processes that will have major impacts on forest dynamics of ACG in the future and highlight how ACG will continue to shape future research priorities in plant ecology. Abstract in Spanish is available with online material.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1065-1075 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Biotropica |
Volume | 52 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are indebted to the directors, staff, and parataxonomists of ACG, especially A. Masis, R. Espinosa, A. Guadamuz, and D. Perez. We thank Roger Blanco, Milena Gutiérrez Leitón, Maria Marta Chavarría, Dan Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs for supporting our work in ACG throughout the years. Any omissions of important plant ecology research in ACG were unintentional and we regret it. Reviewer and editor suggestions improved the breadth and depth of this manuscript, for which we are grateful. CMH is supported by an NSF MacroSystems in Biology Early Career Award (NSF-MSB-ECA #1833358). JSP is supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Terrestrial Ecosystem Science Program (award number DESC0014363).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation
Keywords
- Costa Rica
- climate change
- conservation
- ecological theory
- environmental gradient
- forest dynamics
- tropical forest restoration