Scholars@Duke
John W. Terborgh

John W. Terborgh

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences
Environmental Natural Science
manu@duke.edu
Box 90381, Durham, NC 27708-0381
3705C Erwin Rd, Durham, NC 27705-5015

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

High-quality surrounding landscapes mitigate avian extirpations from forest remnants.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · April 2026 The species-area relationship (SAR) has long been used to predict extirpation rates from habitat loss, but these rates depend not only on habitat area but also on the surrounding landscape and species' habitat specialization. We collated global data from f ... Full text Open Access Cite

Tree diversity is changing across tropical Andean and Amazonian forests in response to global change.

Journal article Nature ecology & evolution · February 2026 Climate and atmospheric changes are impacting forest function and structure worldwide, but their effects on tropical forest diversity are unclear. Nowhere is the scientific challenge greater than in the Andes and the Amazon, which together include the worl ... Full text Cite

Family imprint reveals basin-wide patterns of Amazon forest embolism resistance.

Journal article Nature communications · February 2026 Amazon rainforests face intensifying water stress due to increases in vapour pressure deficit and changing hydrological regimes. Embolism resistance (Ψ50) is a critical metric of tree survival under drought conditions, it is defined as a plant's ... Full text Open Access Cite

Species functional traits affect regional and local dominance across western Amazonian forests

Journal article Journal of Ecology · January 1, 2026 Several studies have documented dominance by few species in Amazonian forests. Dominant species tend to be either locally abundant (local dominants) or regionally frequent (widespread dominants) but rarely both (oligarchs). Here, we explore relationships b ... Full text Cite

Centuries of compounding human influence on Amazonian forests.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · November 2025 Recent evidence suggests that the ecological footprints of pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples in Amazonia persist in modern forests. Ecological impacts resulting from European colonization c. 1550 CE and the Amazonian Rubber Boom c. 1850 to 1920 CE are large ... Full text Cite

Increasing tree size across Amazonia.

Journal article Nature plants · October 2025 Climate change and increasing availability of resources such as carbon dioxide are modifying forest functioning worldwide, but the effects of these changes on forest structure are unclear. As additional resources become available, for example, through CO Full text Cite

Wood density variation across an Andes-to-Amazon elevational gradient

Journal article Journal of Ecology · September 1, 2025 Understanding how functional traits are related to species diversity and ecosystem properties is a central goal of ecology. Wood density is a trait that integrates many aspects of plant form and function and is highly variable among species. Previous studi ... Full text Cite

Amazonian and Andean tree communities are not tracking current climate warming.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2025 Climate change is shifting species distributions, leading to changes in community composition and novel species assemblages worldwide. However, the responses of tropical forests to climate change across large-scale environmental gradients remain largely un ... Full text Cite

Release of tree species diversity follows loss of elephants .from evergreen tropical forests.

Journal article Proceedings. Biological sciences · April 2025 We report on a decade of research on elephant impacts in equatorial evergreen forests in Gabon and Malaysia, comparing sites with (+) and without (-) elephants and documenting major differences in forest structure, tree species composition and tree species ... Full text Open Access Cite

Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · March 2025 Understanding the capacity of forests to adapt to climate change is of pivotal importance for conservation science, yet this is still widely unknown. This knowledge gap is particularly acute in high-biodiversity tropical forests. Here, we examined how trop ... Full text Cite

Variation in wood density across South American tropical forests.

Journal article Nature communications · March 2025 Wood density is a critical control on tree biomass, so poor understanding of its spatial variation can lead to large and systematic errors in forest biomass estimates and carbon maps. The need to understand how and why wood density varies is especially cri ... Full text Open Access Cite

Functional composition of the Amazonian tree flora and forests.

Journal article Communications biology · March 2025 Plants cope with the environment by displaying large phenotypic variation. Two spectra of global plant form and function have been identified: a size spectrum from small to tall species with increasing stem tissue density, leaf size, and seed mass; a leaf ... Full text Cite

Phylogenetic conservatism in the relationship between functional and demographic characteristics in Amazon tree taxa

Journal article Functional Ecology · January 1, 2025 Leaf and wood functional traits of trees are related to growth, reproduction, and survival, but the degree of phylogenetic conservatism in these relationships is largely unknown. In this study, we describe the variability of strategies involving leaf, wood ... Full text Cite

Floodplain forests drive fruit-eating fish diversity at the Amazon Basin-scale.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2025 Unlike most rivers globally, nearly all lowland Amazonian rivers have unregulated flow, supporting seasonally flooded floodplain forests. Floodplain forests harbor a unique tree species assemblage adapted to flooding and specialized fauna, including fruit- ... Full text Open Access Cite

The pace of life for forest trees.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · October 2024 Tree growth and longevity trade-offs fundamentally shape the terrestrial carbon balance. Yet, we lack a unified understanding of how such trade-offs vary across the world's forests. By mapping life history traits for a wide range of species across the Amer ... Full text Cite

The biogeography of the Amazonian tree flora.

Journal article Communications biology · October 2024 We describe the geographical variation in tree species composition across Amazonian forests and show how environmental conditions are associated with species turnover. Our analyses are based on 2023 forest inventory plots (1 ha) that provide abundance data ... Full text Cite

Geography and ecology shape the phylogenetic composition of Amazonian tree communities

Journal article Journal of Biogeography · July 1, 2024 Aim: Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazo ... Full text Cite

Stem breaks as an indirect measure of megafaunal herbivory in tropical forests: An experimental study

Journal article Biotropica · May 1, 2024 To simulate megafaunal (pig, tapir, and elephant) foraging, we cut 1228 saplings in a Sundaic rainforest. In total, 89%–94% of cut stems survived after 13.5 months. About 90% of naturally occurring break scars were at heights ≤1 m, implicating pigs, not el ... Full text Open Access Cite

One sixth of Amazonian tree diversity is dependent on river floodplains.

Journal article Nature ecology & evolution · May 2024 Amazonia's floodplain system is the largest and most biodiverse on Earth. Although forests are crucial to the ecological integrity of floodplains, our understanding of their species composition and how this may differ from surrounding forest types is still ... Full text Cite

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities.

Journal article Nature · January 2024 Trees structure the Earth's most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tr ... Full text Open Access Cite

Mapping density, diversity and species-richness of the Amazon tree flora.

Journal article Communications biology · November 2023 Using 2.046 botanically-inventoried tree plots across the largest tropical forest on Earth, we mapped tree species-diversity and tree species-richness at 0.1-degree resolution, and investigated drivers for diversity and richness. Using only location, strat ... Full text Cite

More than 10,000 pre-Columbian earthworks are still hidden throughout Amazonia.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · October 2023 Indigenous societies are known to have occupied the Amazon basin for more than 12,000 years, but the scale of their influence on Amazonian forests remains uncertain. We report the discovery, using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) information from across ... Full text Cite

Sensitivity of South American tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly

Journal article Nature Climate Change · September 1, 2023 The tropical forest carbon sink is known to be drought sensitive, but it is unclear which forests are the most vulnerable to extreme events. Forests with hotter and drier baseline conditions may be protected by prior adaptation, or more vulnerable because ... Full text Cite

Multiscale phenological niches of seed fall in diverse Amazonian plant communities.

Journal article Ecology · May 2023 Phenology has long been hypothesized as an avenue for niche partitioning or interspecific facilitation, both promoting species coexistence. Tropical plant communities exhibit striking diversity in reproductive phenology, but many are also noted for large s ... Full text Cite

The ‘island syndrome’ is an alternative state

Journal article Journal of Biogeography · March 1, 2023 Aim: In the half-century since publication of the Theory of Island Biology, ecologists have come to recognize the importance of predation as a decisive determinant of alternate states in many ecosystems. Island species are notorious for their vulnerability ... Full text Cite

The structure and organisation of an Amazonian bird community remains little changed after nearly four decades in Manu National Park.

Journal article Ecology letters · February 2023 Documenting patterns of spatiotemporal change in hyper-diverse communities remains a challenge for tropical ecology yet is increasingly urgent as some long-term studies have shown major declines in bird communities in undisturbed sites. In 1982, Terborgh e ... Full text Open Access Cite

Unraveling Amazon tree community assembly using Maximum Information Entropy: a quantitative analysis of tropical forest ecology.

Journal article Scientific reports · February 2023 In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework f ... Full text Cite

Geographic patterns of tree dispersal modes in Amazonia and their ecological correlates

Journal article Global Ecology and Biogeography · January 1, 2023 Aim: To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of th ... Full text Cite

Asian elephants as ecological filters in Sundaic forests

Journal article Frontiers in Forests and Global Change · January 1, 2023 Megaherbivores exert strong top-down influence on the ecosystems they inhabit, yet little is known about the foraging impacts of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) on the structure of Southeast Asia’s rainforests. Our goal was to document Asian elephants’ d ... Full text Open Access Cite

Local hydrological conditions influence tree diversity and composition across the Amazon basin

Journal article Ecography · November 1, 2022 Tree diversity and composition in Amazonia are known to be strongly determined by the water supplied by precipitation. Nevertheless, within the same climatic regime, water availability is modulated by local topography and soil characteristics (hereafter re ... Full text Cite

Water table depth modulates productivity and biomass across Amazonian forests

Journal article Global Ecology and Biogeography · August 1, 2022 Aim: Water availability is the major driver of tropical forest structure and dynamics. Most research has focused on the impacts of climatic water availability, whereas remarkably little is known about the influence of water table depth and excess soil wate ... Full text Cite

Disappearance of an ecosystem engineer, the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), leads to density compensation and ecological release.

Journal article Oecologia · August 2022 Given the rate of biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to understand community-level responses to extirpation events, with two prevailing hypotheses. On one hand, the loss of an apex predator leads to an increase in primary prey species, triggering a ... Full text Cite

Relationships between species richness and ecosystem services in Amazonian forests strongly influenced by biogeographical strata and forest types.

Journal article Scientific reports · April 2022 Despite increasing attention for relationships between species richness and ecosystem services, for tropical forests such relationships are still under discussion. Contradicting relationships have been reported concerning carbon stock, while little is know ... Full text Cite

Correction for Cazzolla Gatti et al., The number of tree species on Earth.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · March 2022 Full text Cite

The number of tree species on Earth.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · February 2022 One of the most fundamental questions in ecology is how many species inhabit the Earth. However, due to massive logistical and financial challenges and taxonomic difficulties connected to the species concept definition, the global numbers of species, inclu ... Full text Cite

Taking the pulse of Earth's tropical forests using networks of highly distributed plots

Journal article Biological Conservation · August 1, 2021 Tropical forests are the most diverse and productive ecosystems on Earth. While better understanding of these forests is critical for our collective future, until quite recently efforts to measure and monitor them have been largely disconnected. Networking ... Full text Open Access Cite

Amazon tree dominance across forest strata.

Journal article Nature ecology & evolution · June 2021 The forests of Amazonia are among the most biodiverse plant communities on Earth. Given the immediate threats posed by climate and land-use change, an improved understanding of how this extraordinary biodiversity is spatially organized is urgently required ... Full text Cite

Mobile piscivores and the nature of top-down forcing in Upper Amazonian floodplain lakes

Journal article Hydrobiologia · January 1, 2021 Shallow lakes can change states in response to manipulations of top predators. In most reported experiments, the top piscivore has been a fish. However, low-latitude lakes typically support non-piscine piscivores, including mammals, birds, and reptiles. Th ... Full text Open Access Cite

CONSERVATION OF THE ORINOCO GOOSE (NEOCHEN JUBATA) IN THE MIDDLE ARAGUAIA RIVER, TOCANTINS, BRAZIL

Journal article Ornitologia Neotropical · January 1, 2021 The Orinoco goose (Neochen jubata) is a grazing herbivore of open habitats that was once widely distributed in tropical South America. Centuries of overhunting and loss of important habitats have reduced it to widely scattered remnant populations and it is ... Full text Cite

At 50, Janzen-Connell has come of age

Journal article Bioscience · December 1, 2020 Fifty years ago, Janzen (1970) and Connell (1971) independently published a revolutionary idea to explain the hyperdiverse tree communities of the tropics. The essential observations were that seedfall is concentrated in the vicinity of fruiting trees, whe ... Full text Open Access Cite

Tree mode of death and mortality risk factors across Amazon forests.

Journal article Nature communications · November 2020 The carbon sink capacity of tropical forests is substantially affected by tree mortality. However, the main drivers of tropical tree death remain largely unknown. Here we present a pan-Amazonian assessment of how and why trees die, analysing over 120,000 t ... Full text Cite

The global abundance of tree palms

Journal article Global Ecology and Biogeography · September 1, 2020 Aim: Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences ... Full text Open Access Cite

Competition influences tree growth, but not mortality, across environmental gradients in Amazonia and tropical Africa.

Journal article Ecology · July 2020 Competition among trees is an important driver of community structure and dynamics in tropical forests. Neighboring trees may impact an individual tree's growth rate and probability of mortality, but large-scale geographic and environmental variation in th ... Full text Cite

Biased-corrected richness estimates for the Amazonian tree flora.

Journal article Scientific reports · June 2020 Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, but the estimated species richness is very much debated. Here, we apply an ensemble of parametric estimators and a novel technique that includes conspecific spatial aggregation to an extended database of fores ... Full text Cite

Gaps present a trade-off between dispersal and establishment that nourishes species diversity.

Journal article Ecology · May 2020 We took advantage of two natural experiments to investigate processes that regulate tree recruitment in gaps. In the first, we examined the recruitment of small and large saplings and trees into 31 gaps resulting from treefalls occurring between 1984 and 2 ... Full text Open Access Cite

Long-term thermal sensitivity of Earth's tropical forests.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · May 2020 The sensitivity of tropical forest carbon to climate is a key uncertainty in predicting global climate change. Although short-term drying and warming are known to affect forests, it is unknown if such effects translate into long-term responses. Here, we an ... Full text Open Access Cite

Changes in tree community structure in defaunated forests are not driven only by dispersal limitation

Journal article Ecology and Evolution · April 1, 2020 Bushmeat hunting has reduced population sizes of large frugivorous vertebrates throughout the tropics, thereby reducing the dispersal of seeds. This is believed to affect tree population dynamics, and therefore community composition, because the seed dispe ... Full text Cite

Evolutionary diversity is associated with wood productivity in Amazonian forests.

Journal article Nature ecology & evolution · December 2019 Higher levels of taxonomic and evolutionary diversity are expected to maximize ecosystem function, yet their relative importance in driving variation in ecosystem function at large scales in diverse forests is unknown. Using 90 inventory plots across intac ... Full text Cite

Rarity of monodominance in hyperdiverse Amazonian forests.

Journal article Scientific reports · September 2019 Tropical forests are known for their high diversity. Yet, forest patches do occur in the tropics where a single tree species is dominant. Such "monodominant" forests are known from all of the main tropical regions. For Amazonia, we sampled the occurrence o ... Full text Cite

Seed limitation in an Amazonian floodplain forest.

Journal article Ecology · May 2019 We monitored a close-spaced grid of 289 seed traps in 1.44 ha for 8.4 yr in an Amazonian floodplain forest. In a tree community containing hundreds of species, a median of just three to four species of tree seeds falls annually into each 0.5-m2 ... Full text Open Access Cite

Individual-based modeling of amazon forests suggests that climate controls productivity while traits control demography

Journal article Frontiers in Earth Science · April 18, 2019 Climate, species composition, and soils are thought to control carbon cycling and forest structure in Amazonian forests. Here, we add a demographics scheme (tree recruitment, growth, and mortality) to a recently developed non-demographic model—the Trait-ba ... Full text Cite

Reply to Cannon and Lerdau: Maintenance of tropical forest tree diversity.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · April 2019 Full text Cite

Compositional response of Amazon forests to climate change.

Journal article Global change biology · January 2019 Most of the planet's diversity is concentrated in the tropics, which includes many regions undergoing rapid climate change. Yet, while climate-induced biodiversity changes are widely documented elsewhere, few studies have addressed this issue for lowland t ... Full text Cite

Tropical forests can maintain hyperdiversity because of enemies.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2019 Explaining the maintenance of tropical forest diversity under the countervailing forces of drift and competition poses a major challenge to ecological theory. Janzen-Connell effects, in which host-specific natural enemies restrict the recruitment of juveni ... Full text Cite

Pan-tropical prediction of forest structure from the largest trees

Journal article Global Ecology and Biogeography · November 1, 2018 Aim: Large tropical trees form the interface between ground and airborne observations, offering a unique opportunity to capture forest properties remotely and to investigate their variations on broad scales. However, despite rapid development of metrics to ... Full text Cite

Defaunation increases the spatial clustering of lowland Western Amazonian tree communities

Journal article Journal of Ecology · July 1, 2018 Declines of large vertebrates in tropical forests may reduce dispersal of tree species that rely on them, and the resulting undispersed seedlings might suffer increased distance- and density-dependent mortality. Consequently, extirpation of large vertebrat ... Full text Cite

Twenty-three-year timeline of ecological stable states and regime shifts in upper Amazon oxbow lakes

Journal article Hydrobiologia · February 1, 2018 Regime shifts in shallow lakes are often associated with anthropogenic impacts, such as land-use change, non-point source nutrient loading, and overfishing. These shifts have mostly been examined in lakes in temperate and boreal regions and within anthropo ... Full text Open Access Cite

Species Distribution Modelling: Contrasting presence-only models with plot abundance data.

Journal article Scientific reports · January 2018 Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in ecology and conservation. Presence-only SDMs such as MaxEnt frequently use natural history collections (NHCs) as occurrence data, given their huge numbers and accessibility. NHCs are often spatially bia ... Full text Cite

Foraging impacts of Asian megafauna on tropical rain forest structure and biodiversity

Journal article Biotropica · January 1, 2018 Megaherbivores are known to influence the structure, composition, and diversity of vegetation. In Central Africa, forest elephants act as ecological filters by breaking tree saplings and stripping them of foliage. Much less is known about impacts of megafa ... Full text Open Access Cite

Gaps contribute tree diversity to a tropical floodplain forest.

Journal article Ecology · November 2017 Treefall gaps have long been a central feature of discussions about the maintenance of tree diversity in both temperate and tropical forests. Gaps expose parts of the forest floor to direct sunlight and create a distinctive microenvironment that can favor ... Full text Cite

Do community-managed forests work? A biodiversity perspective

Journal article Land · June 1, 2017 Community-managed reserves (CMRs) comprise the fastest-growing category of protected areas throughout the tropics. CMRs represent a compromise between advocates of nature conservation and advocates of human development. We ask whether CMRs succeed in achie ... Full text Cite

Seasonal drought limits tree species across the Neotropics

Journal article Ecography · May 1, 2017 Within the tropics, the species richness of tree communities is strongly and positively associated with precipitation. Previous research has suggested that this macroecological pattern is driven by the negative effect of water-stress on the physiological p ... Full text Cite

Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · March 2017 The extent to which pre-Columbian societies altered Amazonian landscapes is hotly debated. We performed a basin-wide analysis of pre-Columbian impacts on Amazonian forests by overlaying known archaeological sites in Amazonia with the distributions and abun ... Full text Open Access Cite

Carbon uptake by mature Amazon forests has mitigated Amazon nations' carbon emissions

Journal article Carbon Balance and Management · February 1, 2017 Background: Several independent lines of evidence suggest that Amazon forests have provided a significant carbon sink service, and also that the Amazon carbon sink in intact, mature forests may now be threatened as a result of different processes. There ha ... Full text Cite

Diversity and carbon storage across the tropical forest biome.

Journal article Scientific reports · January 2017 Tropical forests are global centres of biodiversity and carbon storage. Many tropical countries aspire to protect forest to fulfil biodiversity and climate mitigation policy targets, but the conservation strategies needed to achieve these two functions dep ... Full text Open Access Cite

How mammalian predation contributes to tropical tree community structure.

Journal article Ecology · December 2016 The recruitment of seedlings from seeds is the key demographic transition for rain forest trees. Though tropical forest mammals are known to consume many seeds, their effects on tree community structure remain little known. To evaluate their effects, we mo ... Full text Cite

Variation in stem mortality rates determines patterns of above-ground biomass in Amazonian forests: implications for dynamic global vegetation models.

Journal article Global change biology · December 2016 Understanding the processes that determine above-ground biomass (AGB) in Amazonian forests is important for predicting the sensitivity of these ecosystems to environmental change and for designing and evaluating dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). AG ... Full text Cite

A keystone ecologist: Robert Treat Paine, 1933-2016.

Journal article Ecology · November 2016 Robert T. Paine, who passed away on 13 June 2016, is among the most influential people in the history of ecology. Paine was an experimentalist, a theoretician, a practitioner, and proponent of the "ecology of place," and a deep believer in the importance o ... Full text Cite

Saving the World's Terrestrial Megafauna.

Journal article Bioscience · October 2016 Full text Cite

Amazon forest response to repeated droughts

Journal article Global Biogeochemical Cycles · July 1, 2016 The Amazon Basin has experienced more variable climate over the last decade, with a severe and widespread drought in 2005 causing large basin-wide losses of biomass. A drought of similar climatological magnitude occurred again in 2010; however, there has b ... Full text Cite

Consistent, small effects of treefall disturbances on the composition and diversity of four Amazonian forests.

Journal article Journal of Ecology. · March 2016 Understanding the resilience of moist tropical forests to treefall disturbance events is important for understanding the mechanisms that underlie species coexistence and for predicting the future composition of these ecosystems. Here, we test whether varia ... Full text Cite

The African rainforest: Odd man out or megafaunal landscape? African and Amazonian forests compared

Journal article Ecography · February 1, 2016 Africa has been called the 'odd man out' because the hectare-scale tree diversity of African equatorial forests is lower than that of forests in other parts of the tropics. Low diversity has been attributed to the smaller area of the African forest and a h ... Full text Open Access Cite

Megafaunal influences on tree recruitment in African equatorial forests

Journal article Ecography · February 1, 2016 The forests of central Africa are distinct from counterpart forests in Amazonia by having fewer trees ≥ 10 cm dbh ha-1, especially small trees < 20 cm dbh, and in having sapling cohorts with less diversity than canopy trees. We tested four hypot ... Full text Open Access Cite

Megafauna in the Earth system

Journal article Ecography · February 1, 2016 Understanding the complex role of large-bodied mammals in contemporary ecosystems and the likely consequences of their continued decline is essential for effective management of the remaining wild areas on Earth. The very largest animals are in particular ... Full text Cite

Science for a wilder Anthropocene: Synthesis and future directions for trophic rewilding research.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2016 Trophic rewilding is an ecological restoration strategy that uses species introductions to restore top-down trophic interactions and associated trophic cascades to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems. Given the importance of large animals in trop ... Full text Cite

Reply to Rubenstein and Rubenstein: Time to move on from ideological debates on rewilding.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2016 Full text Cite

Megafauna and ecosystem function from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2016 Large herbivores and carnivores (the megafauna) have been in a state of decline and extinction since the Late Pleistocene, both on land and more recently in the oceans. Much has been written on the timing and causes of these declines, but only recently has ... Full text Open Access Cite

Estimating the global conservation status of more than 15,000 Amazonian tree species.

Journal article Science advances · November 2015 Estimates of extinction risk for Amazonian plant and animal species are rare and not often incorporated into land-use policy and conservation planning. We overlay spatial distribution models with historical and projected deforestation to show that at least ... Full text Cite

Phylogenetic diversity of Amazonian tree communities

Journal article Diversity and Distributions · November 1, 2015 Aim: To examine variation in the phylogenetic diversity (PD) of tree communities across geographical and environmental gradients in Amazonia. Location: Two hundred and eighty-three c. 1 ha forest inventory plots from across Amazonia. Methods: We evaluated ... Full text Cite

Toward a trophic theory of species diversity.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · September 2015 Efforts to understand the ecological regulation of species diversity via bottom-up approaches have failed to yield a consensus theory. Theories based on the alternative of top-down regulation have fared better. Paine's discovery of keystone predation demon ... Full text Open Access Cite

Collapse of the world's largest herbivores.

Journal article Science advances · May 2015 Large wild herbivores are crucial to ecosystems and human societies. We highlight the 74 largest terrestrial herbivore species on Earth (body mass ≥100 kg), the threats they face, their important and often overlooked ecosystem effects, and the conservation ... Full text Cite

Hyperdominance in Amazonian forest carbon cycling.

Journal article Nature communications · April 2015 While Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, the abundance of trees is skewed strongly towards relatively few 'hyperdominant' species. In addition to their diversity, Amazonian trees are a key component of the global carbon cycle, assimilating and ... Full text Cite

Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink.

Journal article Nature · March 2015 Atmospheric carbon dioxide records indicate that the land surface has acted as a strong global carbon sink over recent decades, with a substantial fraction of this sink probably located in the tropics, particularly in the Amazon. Nevertheless, it is unclea ... Full text Cite

'New conservation' or surrender to development?

Journal article Animal Conservation · December 1, 2014 Full text Cite

Markedly divergent estimates of Amazon forest carbon density from ground plots and satellites.

Journal article Global ecology and biogeography : a journal of macroecology · August 2014 AimThe accurate mapping of forest carbon stocks is essential for understanding the global carbon cycle, for assessing emissions from deforestation, and for rational land-use planning. Remote sensing (RS) is currently the key tool for this purpose, ... Full text Cite

Fast demographic traits promote high diversification rates of Amazonian trees.

Journal article Ecology letters · May 2014 The Amazon rain forest sustains the world's highest tree diversity, but it remains unclear why some clades of trees are hyperdiverse, whereas others are not. Using dated phylogenies, estimates of current species richness and trait and demographic data from ... Full text Cite

How many seeds does it take to make a sapling?

Journal article Ecology · April 2014 Tall canopy trees produce many more seeds than do understory treelets, yet, on average, both classes of trees achieve the same lifetime fitness. Using concurrent data on seedfall (8 years) and sapling recruitment (12 years) from a long-established tree plo ... Full text Open Access Cite

Soil physical conditions limit palm and tree basal area in Amazonian forests

Journal article Plant Ecology and Diversity · January 1, 2014 Background: Trees and arborescent palms adopt different rooting strategies and responses to physical limitations imposed by soil structure, depth and anoxia. However, the implications of these differences for understanding variation in the relative abundan ... Full text Cite

Identifying keystone plant resources in an Amazonian forest using a long-term fruit-fall record

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · January 1, 2014 The keystone plant resources (KPR) concept describes certain plant species in tropical forests as vital to community stability and diversity because they provide food resources to vertebrate consumers during the season of scarcity. Here, we use an 8-y, con ... Full text Cite

When top-down becomes bottom up: behaviour of hyperdense howler monkeys (Alouatta seniculus) trapped on a 0.6 ha island.

Journal article PloS one · January 2014 Predators are a ubiquitous presence in most natural environments. Opportunities to contrast the behaviour of a species in the presence and absence of predators are thus rare. Here we report on the behaviour of howler monkey groups living under radically di ... Full text Open Access Cite

Fast demographic traits promote high diversification rates of Amazonian trees

Journal article Ecology Letters · 2014 The Amazon rain forest sustains the world's highest tree diversity, but it remains unclear why some clades of trees are hyperdiverse, whereas others are not. Using dated phylogenies, estimates of current species richness and trait and demographic data from ... Full text Cite

Distribution and abundance of tree species in swamp forests of Amazonian ecuador

Journal article Ecography · January 1, 2014 Research to date on Amazonian swamps has reinforced the impression that tree communities there are dominated by a small, morphologically specialized subset of the regional flora capable of surviving physiologically challenging conditions. In this paper, us ... Full text Cite

Hyperdominance in the Amazonian tree flora.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · October 2013 The vast extent of the Amazon Basin has historically restricted the study of its tree communities to the local and regional scales. Here, we provide empirical data on the commonness, rarity, and richness of lowland tree species across the entire Amazon Bas ... Full text Cite

Using Janzen-Connell to predict the consequences of defaunation and other disturbances of tropical forests

Journal article Biological Conservation · July 1, 2013 The Janzen-Connell (J-C) model of tropical tree recruitment and diversity has come of age and can now be applied to predict the consequences of defaunation and other disturbances. J-C describes a process of recruitment at a distance that results from spati ... Full text Cite

Bird diversity and occurrence of bamboo specia lists in two bamboo die -offs in sout heastern Peru

Journal article Condor · June 10, 2013 A post-flowering die-off of bamboo in an established bird-census plot afforded us an opportunity to investigate the response of bamboo-dwelling birds to a natural transformation of their habitat. In 1984 and 1985 SR and JT generated spot maps for an 80-ha ... Full text Cite

Nothing new in Kareiva and Marvier

Journal article Bioscience · April 1, 2013 Full text Cite

Oligarchies in Amazonian tree communities: A ten-year review

Journal article Ecography · February 1, 2013 This paper revisits various hypotheses about oligarchic patterns in Amazonian tree communities put forward by Pitman et al. (2001). Together, these hypotheses predict that most lowland sites in the Amazon are located within large patches of relatively homo ... Full text Cite

Preface

Journal article Trophic Cascades Predators Prey and the Changingdynamics of Nature · January 1, 2013 Cite

Soil physical conditions limit palm and tree basal area in Amazonian forests

Journal article Plant Ecology and Diversity · 2013 Cite

Reply to cucherousset et al.

Journal article Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment · October 1, 2012 Full text Cite

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas.

Journal article Nature · September 2012 The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural eco ... Full text Cite

Basin-wide variations in Amazon forest structure and function are mediated by both soils and climate

Journal article Biogeosciences · July 6, 2012 Forest structure and dynamics vary across the Amazon Basin in an east-west gradient coincident with variations in soil fertility and geology. This has resulted in the hypothesis that soil fertility may play an important role in explaining Basin-wide variat ... Full text Cite

Historical effects on beta diversity and community assembly in Amazonian trees.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · May 2012 We present a unique perspective on the role of historical processes in community assembly by synthesizing analyses of species turnover among communities with environmental data and independent, population genetic-derived estimates of among-community disper ... Full text Cite

Enemies maintain hyperdiverse tropical forests.

Journal article The American naturalist · March 2012 Understanding tropical forest tree diversity has been a major challenge to ecologists. In the absence of compensatory mechanisms, two powerful forces, drift and competition, are expected to erode diversity quickly, especially in communities containing scor ... Full text Cite

Tree height integrated into pantropical forest biomass estimates

Journal article Biogeosciences · January 1, 2012 Aboveground tropical tree biomass and carbon storage estimates commonly ignore tree height (H). We estimate the effect of incorporating H on tropics-wide forest biomass estimates in 327 plots across four continents using 42 656 H and diameter measurements ... Full text Cite

Lateral migration of fish between an oxbow lake and an Amazonian headwater river

Journal article Ecology of Freshwater Fish · December 1, 2011 We report on lateral movements of fish between an Amazonian headwater river (Manu River in Manu National Park, Perú) and a 24-ha oxbow lake (Cocha Cashu) in the adjacent floodplain. During wet season flood pulses, or 'crecientes,' fish can enter and exit t ... Full text Cite

Indigenous perceptions of tree species abundance across an upper Amazonian landscape

Journal article Journal of Ethnobiology · September 1, 2011 Indigenous cultures know a great deal about the landscape they inhabit, and their knowledge can be a valuable tool for ecologists. In order to explore how residents' knowledge might help characterize a large and diverse forest type in southeastern Peru, we ... Full text Cite

Trophic downgrading of planet Earth.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · July 2011 Until recently, large apex consumers were ubiquitous across the globe and had been for millions of years. The loss of these animals may be humankind's most pervasive influence on nature. Although such losses are widely viewed as an ethical and aesthetic pr ... Full text Cite

Fates of seedling carpets in an Amazonian floodplain forest: Intra-cohort competition or attack by enemies?

Journal article Journal of Ecology · July 1, 2011 1.The operation of 'negative density-dependence' in seedling cohorts in tropical forests is empirically well-established, but only at a phenomenological level that leaves open the question of why seedlings conspecific with an overtopping parent tree experi ... Full text Cite

Decomposing dispersal limitation: Limits on fecundity or seed distribution?

Journal article Journal of Ecology · July 1, 2011 1.The term 'dispersal limitation' represents two distinct component processes: the number of seeds produced (fecundity) and the spatial pattern of the seed rain (distribution). We present a quantitative evaluation of these component processes of dispersal ... Full text Cite

Elevational ranges of birds on a tropical montane gradient lag behind warming temperatures.

Journal article PloS one · January 2011 BackgroundSpecies may respond to a warming climate by moving to higher latitudes or elevations. Shifts in geographic ranges are common responses in temperate regions. For the tropics, latitudinal temperature gradients are shallow; the only escape ... Full text Open Access Cite

Are all seeds equal? Spatially explicit comparisons of seed fall and sapling recruitment in a tropical forest

Journal article Ecology Letters · January 1, 2011 Ecology Letters (2011) 14: 195-201 Understanding demographic transitions may provide the key to explain the high diversity of tropical tree communities. In a faunally intact Amazonian forest, we compared the spatial distribution of saplings of 15 common tr ... Full text Cite

The effects of plant pathogens on tree recruitment in the Western Amazon under a projected future climate: a dynamical systems analysis

Journal article Journal of Ecology. · November 2010 1. Climate change predictions in the Amazon have largely focused on carbon-water relations, while the impacts of increased air temperature and reduced precipitation on host-pathogen relationships have not been extensively explored. These relationships are ... Full text Cite

Distance-responsive natural enemies strongly influence seedling establishment patterns of multiple species in an Amazonian rain forest

Journal article Journal of Ecology · September 1, 2010 1. In a faunally intact lowland Amazonian rain forest stand, we conducted a long-term multi-species experiment aimed at determining the primary mechanistic basis of seedling establishment patterns. We deployed a total of 1050 experimental seedlings, repres ... Full text Cite

Funding should come to those who wait.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · July 2010 Full text Cite

Forensics. Familial DNA testing scores a win in serial killer case.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · July 2010 Full text Cite

Climate change and the integrity of science.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · May 2010 Full text Cite

Perspecitives on the issue of people in parks

Journal article Conservation and Society · 2010 Cite

The trophic cascade on islands

Journal article · October 19, 2009 Cite

Spatial organization of vegetation arising from non-local excitation with local inhibition in tropical rainforests

Journal article Physica D Nonlinear Phenomena · June 15, 2009 The Janzen-Connell (JC) effect, which hypothesizes that recruitment and growth of seedlings is positively correlated to the distance from the parent tree, is shown to generate highly organized vegetation biomass spatial patterns when coupled to a revised F ... Full text Cite

Drought sensitivity of the Amazon rainforest.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · March 2009 Amazon forests are a key but poorly understood component of the global carbon cycle. If, as anticipated, they dry this century, they might accelerate climate change through carbon losses and changed surface energy balances. We used records from multiple lo ... Full text Cite

Regional and large-scale patterns in Amazon forest structure and function are mediated by variations in soil physical and chemical properties

Journal article Biogeosciences Discussions · January 1, 2009 Forest structure and dynamics have been noted to vary across the Amazon Basin in an east-west gradient in a pattern which coincides with variations in soil fertility and geology. This has resulted in the hypothesis that soil fertility may play an important ... Full text Cite

Does the disturbance hypothesis explain the biomass increase in basin-wide Amazon forest plot data?

Journal article Global Change Biology · January 1, 2009 Positive aboveground biomass trends have been reported from old-growth forests across the Amazon basin and hypothesized to reflect a large-scale response to exterior forcing. The result could, however, be an artefact due to a sampling bias induced by the n ... Full text Cite

Direct versus indirect effects of habitat reduction on the loss of avian species from tropical forest fragments

Journal article Animal Conservation · October 23, 2008 Tropical forest fragments typically decrease in avian diversity at rates inversely related to area. However, the mechanisms by which area reduction drives avian species loss remain poorly understood. Changes in habitat area may directly lead to species los ... Full text Cite

Trophic drivers of species loss from fragments

Journal article Animal Conservation · October 22, 2008 Full text Cite

Tree recruitment in an empty forest.

Journal article Ecology · June 2008 To assess how the decimation of large vertebrates by hunting alters recruitment processes in a tropical forest, we compared the sapling cohorts of two structurally and compositionally similar forests in the Rio Manu floodplain in southeastern Peru. Large v ... Full text Cite

Seed characteristics and susceptibility to pathogen attack in tree seeds of the Peruvian Amazon

Journal article Plant Ecology · December 1, 2007 Many studies now suggest that pathogens can cause high levels of mortality in seeds and seedlings. Recruitment from seed to sapling is an important bottleneck for many tree species, and if specialist or generalist pathogens have differential negative effec ... Full text Cite

Seed predation and seedling herbivory as factors in tree recruitment failure on predator-free forested islands

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · March 1, 2007 Sapling mortality exceeds recruitment for many species of trees in the dry forest of 16-y-old islets in Lago Guri, Venezuela. Failure of sapling recruitment is potentially attributable to the aberrant animal communities of these islands. Predators of verte ... Full text Cite

The regional variation of aboveground live biomass in old-growth Amazonian forests

Journal article Global Change Biology · July 1, 2006 The biomass of tropical forests plays an important role in the global carbon cycle, both as a dynamic reservoir of carbon, and as a source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in areas undergoing deforestation. However, the absolute magnitude and environmen ... Full text Cite

Vegetation dynamics of predator-free land-bridge islands

Journal article Journal of Ecology · March 1, 2006 1 We tested the 'green world' hypothesis of Hairston, Smith and Slobodkin by monitoring vegetation change on recently created predator-free land-bridge islands in a huge hydroelectric impoundment, Lago Guri, in the State of Bolivar, Venezuela. 2 Our result ... Full text Cite

Habitat fragmentation and effects of herbivore (howler monkey) abundances on bird species richness.

Journal article Ecology · January 2006 Habitat fragmentation can alter herbivore abundances, potentially causing changes in the plant community that can propagate through the food web and eventually influence other important taxonomic groups such as birds. Here we test the relationship between ... Full text Cite

The utility of spectral indices from Landsat ETM+ for measuring the structure and composition of tropical dry forests

Journal article Biotropica · December 1, 2005 There is a growing emphasis on developing methods for quantifying the structure and composition of tropical forests that can be applied over large landscapes, especially for tropical dry forests that are severely fragmented and have a high conservation pri ... Full text Cite

Food selection by a hyperdense population of red howler monkeys (Alouatta seniculus)

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · July 1, 2005 We studied diet choice by a generalist herbivore, the red howler monkey (Alouatta seniculus) under conditions of high and normal population density. Densities equivalent to 800-1000 km-2 (roughly 20-40 times normal) occurred in populations trapp ... Full text Cite

Science and society at the World Parks Congress (multiple letters)

Journal article Conservation Biology · January 1, 2005 Full text Cite

The effects of herbivore density on soil nutrients and tree growth in tropical forest fragments

Journal article Ecology · January 1, 2005 The role of herbivores in nutrient cycling in tropical forest ecosystems remains poorly understood. This study investigates several aspects of nutrient cycling along a gradient in herbivore (Alouatta seniculus, red howler monkey) density among small landbr ... Full text Cite

Tropical forest tree mortality, recruitment and turnover rates: Calculation, interpretation and comparison when census intervals vary

Journal article Journal of Ecology · December 1, 2004 1 Mathematical proofs show that rate estimates, for example of mortality and recruitment, will decrease with increasing census interval when obtained from censuses of non-homogeneous populations. This census interval effect could be confounding or perhaps ... Full text Cite

Falling palm fronds structure amazonian rainforest sapling communities.

Journal article Proceedings. Biological sciences · August 2004 The senescence and loss of photosynthetic and support structures is a nearly universal aspect of tree life history, and can be a major source of disturbance in forest understoreys, but the ability of falling canopy debris in determining the stature and com ... Full text Cite

Reflections of a Scientist on the World Parks Congress

Journal article Conservation Biology · June 1, 2004 Full text Cite

The above-ground coarse wood productivity of 104 Neotropical forest plots

Journal article Global Change Biology · May 1, 2004 The net primary production of tropical forests and its partitioning between long-lived carbon pools (wood) and shorter-lived pools (leaves, fine roots) are of considerable importance in the global carbon cycle. However, these terms have only been studied a ... Full text Cite

Pattern and process in Amazon tree turnover, 1976-2001.

Journal article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · March 2004 Previous work has shown that tree turnover, tree biomass and large liana densities have increased in mature tropical forest plots in the late twentieth century. These results point to a concerted shift in forest ecological processes that may already be hav ... Full text Cite

Concerted changes in tropical forest structure and dynamics: evidence from 50 South American long-term plots.

Journal article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · March 2004 Several widespread changes in the ecology of old-growth tropical forests have recently been documented for the late twentieth century, in particular an increase in stem turnover (pan-tropical), and an increase in above-ground biomass (neotropical). Whether ... Full text Cite

Why do some tropical forests have so many species of trees?

Journal article Biotropica · January 1, 2004 Understanding why there are so many kinds of tropical trees requires learning, not only how tree species coexist, but what factors drive tree speciation and what governs a tree clade's diversification rate. Many report that hybrid sterility evolves very sl ... Full text Cite

A spatial model of tree α-diversity and tree density for the Amazon

Journal article Biodiversity and Conservation · November 1, 2003 Large-scale patterns of Amazonian biodiversity have until now been obscured by a sparse and scattered inventory record. Here we present the first comprehensive spatial model of tree α-diversity and tree density in Amazonian rainforests, based on the larges ... Full text Cite

Rodents on tropical land-bridge islands

Journal article Journal of Zoology · June 1, 2003 The results are reported of a survey of rodents on 10 forested land-bridge islands ranging in size from 0.2 to 350 ha in the state of Bolívar, Venezuela. The islands were contained within a lake formed c. 12 years before the study by the damming of the Car ... Full text Cite

Population regulation of a dominant rain forest tree by a major seed predator

Journal article Ecology · February 1, 2003 We take advantage of a fortuitous local extinction and recolonization of white-lipped peccaries (WLPs) at the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in southeastern Peru to assess the impact of this high-biomass seed predator on the recruitment of a dominant membe ... Full text Cite

Size-abundance relationships in an Amazonian bird community: implications for the energetic equivalence rule.

Journal article The American naturalist · February 2003 We studied size-abundance relationships in a species-rich Amazonian bird community and found that the slope of the logarithmic relationship between population density and bodymass (b = -0.22) is significantly shallower than expected under Damuth's energeti ... Full text Cite

Consequences of Habitat Fragmentation on Age Structure and Life History in a Tortoise Population

Journal article Biotropica · January 1, 2003 We studied changes in a population of red-footed Amazonian tortoises, Geochelone carbonaria, consequent to isolation in an insular forest fragment. Altered age structure, population density, and body growth rate are shown here for the first time to be asso ... Full text Cite

A comparison of tree species diversity in two upper Amazonian forests

Journal article Ecology · November 1, 2002 We inventoried two Amazonian tree communities separated by ∼1400 km of continuous lowland tropical forest, in an effort to understand why one was more diverse than the other. Yasuní National Park, near the equator in eastern Ecuador, has one of the most di ... Full text Cite

Ectomycorrhizal fungi and their leguminous hosts in the Pakaraima Mountains of Guyana.

Journal article Mycological research · May 2002 Ecologically important ectomycorrhizal (EM) associations are poorly known from equatorial rain forests of South America. Recent field studies in the Pakaraima Mountains of western Guyana revealed previously undocumented forests dominated by EM leguminous t ... Full text Cite

Groves versus isolates: How spatial aggregation of Astrocaryum murumuru palms affects seed removal

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · March 19, 2002 Palm seeds of the genus Astrocaryum are known to attract a wide range of seed predators, including insects, rodents and peccaries. We investigated the removal of seeds of Astrocaryum murumuru var. macrocalyx in dense groves and under solitary palms, both w ... Full text Cite

Beta-diversity in tropical forest trees.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · January 2002 The high alpha-diversity of tropical forests has been amply documented, but beta-diversity-how species composition changes with distance-has seldom been studied. We present quantitative estimates of beta-diversity for tropical trees by comparing species co ... Full text Cite

Ecological meltdown in predator-free forest fragments.

Journal article Science (New York, N.Y.) · November 2001 The manner in which terrestrial ecosystems are regulated is controversial. The "top-down" school holds that predators limit herbivores and thereby prevent them from overexploiting vegetation. "Bottom-up" proponents stress the role of plant chemical defense ... Full text Cite

Increased herbivory in forest isolates: Implications for plant community structure and composition

Journal article Conservation Biology · June 23, 2001 Understanding processes driving population declines and, ultimately, species loss in forest isolates has significant implications for the long-term maintenance of species diversity. We investigated a potential mechanism driving loss of plant species in sma ... Full text Cite

Endogenous and exogenous control of leaf morphology in iriartea deltoidea (palmae)

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · January 1, 2001 Like many other palms, Iriartea deltoidea undergoes ontogenetic transitions in leaf morphology. It has been asked whether the transition to adult leaf form in Iriartea was a fixed developmental pattern or a more plastic response to changes in environmental ... Full text Cite

Dominance and distribution of tree species in upper Amazonian terra firme forests

Journal article Ecology · January 1, 2001 Amazonian forests are the largest and most diverse in the tropics, and much of the mystery surrounding their ecology can be traced to attempts to understand them through tiny local inventories. In this paper we bring together a large number of such invento ... Full text Cite

In the company of humans

Journal article Natural History · 2000 Cite

The fate of tropical forests: A matter of stewardship

Journal article Conservation Biology · January 1, 2000 Full text Cite

Frugivorous butterflies in Venezuelan forest fragments: Abundance, diversity and the effects of isolation

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · November 1, 1999 Frugivorous butterflies were studied in a set of forested islands (0.1 to 1.15 ha) in a reservoir in eastern Venezuela to investigate the effects of fragmentation and the resulting isolation on their abundance, diversity and species composition. While some ... Full text Cite

Partitioning of the understorey light environment by two Amazonian treelets

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · November 1, 1999 Primary tropical forests comprise a mosaic of mature, gap and building phase patches, resulting in great spatial variation in the distribution of foliage. Light may consequently penetrate into the forest interior over a wide range of angles. It thus seems ... Full text Cite

Trouble in paradise: an exchange

Journal article New York Review of Books · August 1999 Cite

Tree species distributions in an upper Amazonian forest

Journal article Ecology · January 1, 1999 Not a single tree species distribution in the Amazon basin has been reliably mapped, though speculation regarding such distributions has been extensive. We present data from a network of 21 forest plots in Manu National Park, Peru, totaling >36 ha and site ... Full text Cite

The fruits the agouti ate: Hymenaea courbaril seed fate when its disperser is absent

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · January 1, 1999 Full text Cite

The composition of Amazonian forests: Patterns at local and regional scales

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · September 1, 1998 An analysis was conducted of floristic patterns contained in 48 1-ha tree plots distributed at 29 sites in seven neotropical countries, with a primary emphasis on the Amazonian region. Analyses were made with family level data, using detrended corresponden ... Full text Cite

Can high tree species richness be explained by Hubbell's null model?

Journal article Ecology Letters · January 1, 1998 We examine several features of Hubbell's nonequilibrium, or "null", model of tree dynamics, which holds that species-rich tropical tree communities are maintained on a local scale by a balance of extinction and immigration, and on a global scale by a balan ... Full text Cite

Estimating the ages of successional stands of tropical trees from growth increments

Journal article Journal of Tropical Ecology · January 1, 1997 Inability to age tropical trees has imposed major limitations on the basic and applied science of tropical forests. Here advantage was taken of even-aged stands present in successional chronosequences found on Amazonian whitewater river meanders to simplif ... Full text Cite

Bird communities in transition: The Lago Guri islands

Journal article Ecology · January 1, 1997 We report on the bird communities of a set of 12 7-yr-old forested land-bridge islands in Lago Guri, a 4300 km2 hydroelectric impoundment in the State of Bolivar, Venezuela. Birds were censused on all islands and at mainland control sites by spo ... Full text Cite

Tropical tree communities: A test of the nonequilibrium hypothesis

Journal article Ecology · January 1, 1996 We have conducted a test of Hubbell's nonequilibrium model of tropical forest dynamics and found that it fails to account for high levels of compositional similarity in disjunct samples of floodplain forest in the Manu River basin of southeastern Peru. In ... Full text Cite

Saddle-back tamarin (Saguinus fuscicollis) reproductive strategies: Evidence from a thirteen-year study of a marked population.

Journal article American journal of primatology · January 1996 We monitored a population of four to seven groups of individually marked saddle-back tamarins (Saguinus fuscicollis; Callitrichidae) at the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Peru's Manu National Park every year from 1979 through 1992. In this paper we use ... Full text Cite

Amazonian Nature Reserves: An Analysis of the Defensibility Status of Existing Conservation Units and Design Criteria for the Future

Journal article Conservation Biology · February 1, 1995 Many tropical nature reserves are woefully understaffed or exist only on paper. Without effective implementation, tropical reserves cannot count on in situ enforcement and consequently are subject to a wide range of invasive threats. Weak institutional str ... Full text Cite

Distribution and habitat use of Neotropical migrant landbirds in the Amazon basin and Andes

Journal article Bird Conservation International · January 1, 1995 We documented the geographical distributions and habitat selection of Neotropical migrants in South America along a successional gradient in the lowlands of Amazonian Peru, and along elevational gradients in the Andes of south-eastern Peru and of eastern a ... Full text Cite

Interspecific aggression and habitat selection by Amazonian birds

Journal article Journal of Animal Ecology · January 1, 1995 Full text Cite

Predation by vertebrates and invertebrates on the seeds of five canopy tree species of an Amazonian forest

Journal article Vegetatio · June 1, 1993 We studied the pre-germination loss of seeds to invertebrate and vertebrate seed predators of 5 species of Amazonian trees (Astrocaryum macrocalyx-Palmae; Bertholletia excelsa-Lecithydaceae; Calatola venezuelana-Icacinaceae; Dipteryx micrantha-Leguminosae ... Full text Cite

Can Extractive Reserves Save the Rain Forest? An Ecological and Socioeconomic Comparison of Nontimber Forest Product Extraction Systems in Petén, Guatemala, and West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Journal article Conservation Biology · March 1, 1993 We compare existing nontimber forest product extraction systems in Petén, Guatemala, and West Kalimantan, Indonesia, to identify key ecological, socioeconomic, and political factors in the design and implementation of extractive reserves. Ecological parame ... Full text Cite

The phenology of tropical forests: Adaptive significance and consequences for primary consumers

Journal article Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics · January 1, 1993 Most tropical woody plants produce new leaves and flowers in bursts rather than continuously, and most tropical forest communities display seasonal variation in the presence of new leaves, flowers, and fruits. This patterning suggests that phenological cha ... Full text Cite

Maintenance of diversity in tropical forests

Journal article Biotropica · January 1, 1992 Focuses on the Atlantic coastal forests of Brazil which have been reduced to <10% of their former extent and which have been greatly fragmented. Implications of such loss and fragmentation to species richness are reviewed, and possible management steps to ... Full text Cite

Why American songbirds are vanishing

Journal article Scientific American · January 1, 1992 Pesticides were blamed when familiar songbirds were suddenly stilled in the 1960s. The worst culprits were banned, but migratory songbirds continue to decline. The reasons, the author argues, are increased pressure from predators and parasites in North Ame ... Full text Cite

Development of habitat structure through succession in an Amazonian floodplain forest

Journal article Habitat Structure · January 1, 1991 Provides a descriptive overview of riparian primary succession near the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in the Manu National Park, Peru. Plant growth may be rapid in the early stages of colonisation of newly-formed alluvial deposits (where the characteristi ... Full text Cite

Mixed flocks and polyspecific associations: Costs and benefits of mixed groups to birds and monkeys

Journal article American Journal of Primatology · January 1, 1990 This review examines the diversity of avian mixed foraging flocks with the goal of relating the conclusions to primate polyspecific associations. Mixed associations are considered as adaptations for achieving an optimal balance between predator protection ... Full text Cite

Structure and organization of an Amazonian forest bird community

Journal article Ecological Monographs · January 1, 1990 To help fill the gap in detailed knowledge of avian community structure in tropical forests, we undertook a census of a 97-ha plot of floodplain forest in Amazonian Peru. The plot was censused over a 3-mo period spanning the 1982 breeding season. The coope ... Full text Cite

Demography and dispersal patterns of a tamarin population: possible causes of delayed breeding

Journal article American Naturalist · January 1, 1989 Saddle-back tamarins Saguinus fuscicollis in Peru live in small groups with 1 reproductive female and 1-2 breeding males. Most animals do not first breed for at least 1yr past the age of potential sexual maturity. Data on survival of adults and lengths of ... Full text Cite

Seasonal food shortage, weight loss, and the timing of births in saddle-back tamarins (Saguinus fuscicollis)

Journal article Journal of Animal Ecology · January 1, 1988 Saguinus fuscicollis (Callitrichidae) were studied in the Cocha Cashu Biological Station, Manu National Park, Peru. Availability of both fruits and insects was substantially lower during the annual 4-month dry season (May-September) than at other times of ... Full text Cite

The surreptitious life of the saddle-backed tamarin.

Journal article American Scientist · January 1, 1987 An attempt is made to answer why the small South American Saguinus fuscicollis is relatively rare and why it maintains large territories with fixed boundaries. The key appears to be access during July and August to Combretum vine nectar, which is a poor re ... Cite

Oddity and the 'confusion effect' in predation

Journal article Animal Behaviour · January 1, 1986 We report on two sets of experiments designed to clarify the roles of sensory 'confusion' and prey 'oddity' as they interact to influence the hunting success of a pursuit predator, the largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), on silvery minnows (Hybognathu ... Full text Cite

Conservation priorities in the Philippine Archipelago.

Journal article Forktail · January 1, 1986 To determine how conservation planning should most efficiently proceed so as to protect all the Philippine Archipelago's terrestrial vertebrate species, the authors took the island having the largest total number of species (Mindanao), identified the islan ... Cite

The socioecology of primate groups.

Journal article Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics Vol 17 · January 1, 1986 Focuses on the development of theory related to possible links between environmental variables and the social organisation of primate groups. Paying attention to the adaptive basis of group structure and activity, the evolution of group size is explored by ... Full text Cite

On the mating system of the cooperatively breeding saddle-backed tamarin (Saguinus fuscicollis)

Journal article Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology · April 1, 1985 This paper reports on 5 years of observatiors of individually marked saddle-backed tamarins (Saguinus fuscicollis, Callitrichidae). Although callitrichids have long been presumed to have a monogamous social system, this study shows that the breeding struct ... Full text Cite

The role of ecotones in the distribution of Andean birds.

Journal article Ecology · January 1, 1985 For a set of 47 bird species whose limits (16 upper, 31 lower) coincided with the montane rain forest-cloud forest ecotone on the Cordillera Vilcabamba control transect, it was determined whether, as predicted, the species expanded or contracted their dist ... Full text Cite

Habitat selection in Amazonian birds.

Journal article Habitat Selection in Birds · January 1, 1985 Describes the vegetation types of W Amazonia, where avian diversity is greatest, paying attention to the landscapes, vegetation structure, species diversity and succession within tropical moist forest and tropical wet forest regions. Organization of the bi ... Cite

The vertical component of plant species diversity in temperate and tropical forests.

Journal article American Naturalist · January 1, 1985 In the E USA, deciduous forests growing between 30o-42o N are commonly constructed of a high canopy of sun-adapted trees, a shade-tolerant herbaceous ground layer, and a midstory of shrubs or small trees. Woody species occupying ecologically equivalent pos ... Full text Cite

Observations on the Behavior of Rain Forest Peccaries in Perú: Why do White‐lipped Peccaries Form Herds?

Journal article Zeitschrift Fur Tierpsychologie · January 1, 1983 The ecology and behavior of Tayassu tajacu and T. pecari were studied for a total period of 16 months in the years 1975–1978 in the Manú National Park in southeastern Perú. It appears from 132 sightings of T. tajacu at the study site, and from reports from ... Full text Cite

A method for siting parks and reserves with special reference to Columbia and Ecuador

Journal article Biological Conservation · January 1, 1983 Many tropical countries contain large numbers of species with small geographical ranges, here, for convenience, termed endemics. South America, for example, harbours 440 endemic land birds having ranges of less than 50 000 km2. These comprise ab ... Full text Cite

Saturation of Bird Communities in the West Indies

Journal article The American Naturalist · August 1980 Full text Cite

NEW SPECIES OF HUMMINGBIRD FROM PERU

Journal article WILSON BULLETIN · 1979 Link to item Cite

Bird species diversity on an andean elev ational gradient

Journal article Ecology · January 1, 1977 This paper analyzes patterns of bird species diversity on an elevational transect of the Cordillera Vileabamba, Peru. Major changes in climate and vegetation are encompassed by the transect which extended from the Apurimac Valley floor at 500 m to the summ ... Full text Cite

EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS ON THE RATE OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS AND SOME PHOTOSYNTHETIC ENZYMES IN DUNALIELLA TERTIOLECTA BUTCHER

Journal article Limnology and Oceanography · January 1, 1967 This article is in Free Access Publication and may be downloaded using the “Download Full Text PDF” link at right. © 1967, by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, Inc. ... Full text Cite

The control of development in Acetabularia crenulata by light

Journal article Planta · September 1, 1965 1. The elongation of Acetabularia crenulata cells ceases abruptly at morphogenesis; all further growth normally takes the form of cap (gametangium) expansion. Cell volume, however, increases without inflection during the phases of stalk elongation and cap ... Full text Cite