I am tropical forest ecologist from Colombia. My doctorate studies centered around understanding the role of stochastic and deterministic processes in the assembly of tropical forests. In particular, I studied how these processes could shape observed dynamics when they occur at different organization levels (e.g., functional groups and species). I recently started a postdoctoral position at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies aiming to understand what kills the world's largest tropical trees and thereby influences global climate.
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The importance and implications of variation in longevity among giant tropical tree taxa
V. E. RUBIO
, E. M. GORA, A. ESQUIVEL-MUELBERT
Giant trees dominate trends in biodiversity and function in tropical forests, with the largest 1% of the trees contributing ~50% of productivity and above-ground carbon storage. The life-history of these trees and trends in their longevity are critically important to understanding forest function, informing conservation efforts, and managing the influence of tropical forests on global climate. However, we know very little about variation in giant tree longevity because they are underrepresented in plots. Here we investigate the importance and implications of variation in giant tree survivorship using an unprecedented dataset describing their demography over 10-40years across 128ha of plots in a single lowland tropical forest (
7,951,693
tree-years of monitoring). We show that mean mortality rates, and thereby longevity, vary by an order of magnitude among common giant tree data. We quantitatively test how this variation in longevity influences neighborhood forest structure and diversity. We then explore their life-history and functional strategies to provide insight into the factors underlying variation in longevity among giant tree taxa. Moreover, we use simulations to explore the implications of this variation for forest recovery, patch-dynamics, and the maintenance of biodiversity, and we explore the vulnerability of these taxa to habitat fragmentation and their conservation value.