Longevity and Diversity – overview

DESIGN                                 FINDINGS                             PUBLICATIONS 

STAND LONGEVITY AND LIFE-FORM DIVERSITY AS CONTROLS OF ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING

A couple of years after the CATIE project, a sabbatical leave gave me the opportunity to reflect on what we had learned. I was struck by two things. First, everything we saw at CATIE indicated that there was substantial functional redundancy with respect to ecosystem processes among species, signaling to me the need to explore the effects of diversity at the low end of the scale. Second, the effects of stand longevity were often confounded with those of diversity, particularly in the agroecology and agroforestry literature.

In 1991 colleagues and I launched a project at the Organization for Tropical Studies’, Inc., La Selva Biological Station, in the humid Atlantic lowlands of Costa Rica (~ 4 m of annual rainfall; 41 masl). The field study extended until 2004, by which time the trajectory of most of the study plots was apparent. Work on the nearly 100 Huertos data sets, especially cross-topic syntheses, continues.