Lourens Poorter is a professor in functional ecology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. For the past 30 years he has worked in tropical forests in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, in close collaboration with his PhD students and a large network of colleagues from all over the world. He has published more than 200 peer reviewed articles.
His main research interests are functional ecology and secondary forest succession. He is fascinated how species differ in their traits, and how these traits shape species performance, community assembly, ecosystem processes and services.
He is one of the coordinators of the 2ndFOR research network on secondary tropical forest succession (www.2ndFOR.org) and has led several synthetic analyses on the drivers and mechanisms of tropical forest succession. He has also received a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant to study the Biodiversity and recovery of forests in tropical landscapes (pantrop-eu.com). Such an improved, mechanistic understanding of succession can help to restore ecosystems and to design sustainable, multifunctional landscapes, that benefit both nature and society.
Functional recovery of secondary tropical forests
Tropical forests disappear rapidly through deforestation but also have the potential to regrow naturally through secondary succession. To advance successional theory, it is essential to understand how these secondary forests and their assembly vary across broad spatial scales. Here I present some of the main findings of the 2ndFOR research network on secondary forest succession (www.2ndFOR.org) that provides a long-term perspective on succession using >100 chronosequence sites across the tropics. We synthesize continental-scale patterns in succession using a functional trait approach and show that the start and pathway of succession varies with climatic water availability. In dry forests, species turnover is driven by drought tolerance traits that are important early in succession and in wet forests by shade tolerance traits that are important later in succession. Based on these successional principles, we propose ecologically sound strategies to improve forest restoration success.