NDLI: The Genus Cecropia: A Biological Clock to Estimate the Age of Recently Disturbed Areas in the Neotropics

Content Provider	PubMed Central
Author	Zalamea, Paul-camilo Patrick, Heuret Sarmiento, Carolina Rodríguez, Manuel Anne, Berthouly Stéphane, Guitet Nicolini, Eric César, Delnatte Barthélémy, Daniel Stevenson, Pablo R.
Editor	Ben, Bond-lamberty
Copyright Year	2012
Abstract	Forest successional processes following disturbance take decades to play out, even in tropical forests. Nonetheless, records of vegetation change in this ecosystem are scarce, increasing the importance of the chronosequence approach to study forest recovery. However, this approach requires accurate dating of secondary forests, which until now was a difficult and/or expensive task. Cecropia is a widespread and abundant pioneer tree genus of the Neotropics. Here we propose and validate a rapid and straightforward method to estimate the age of secondary forest patches based on morphological observations of Cecropia trees. We found that Cecropia-inferred ages were highly correlated with known ages of the forest. We also demonstrate that Cecropia can be used to accurately date disturbances and propose twenty-one species distributed all over the geographical range of the genus as potential secondary forest chronometer species. Our method is limited in applicability by the maximal longevity of Cecropia individuals. Although the oldest chronosequence used in this study was 20 years old, we argue that at least for the first four decades after disturbance, the method described in this study provides very accurate estimations of secondary forest ages. The age of pioneer trees provides not only information needed to calculate the recovery of carbon stocks that would help to improve forest management, but also provides information needed to characterize the initial floristic composition and the rates of species remigration into secondary forest. Our contribution shows how successional studies can be reliably and inexpensively extended without the need to obtain forest ages based on expensive or potentially inaccurate data across the Neotropics.
Related Links	http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042643
Starting Page	42643
File Format	PDF
ISSN	19326203
e-ISSN	19326203
Journal	PLoS ONE
Issue Number	8
Volume Number	7
Language	English
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Publisher Date	2012-08-01
Access Restriction	Open
Rights Holder	Public Library of Science
Subject Keyword	Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all) Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all) Medicine(all) Research in Higher Education
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Multidisciplinary

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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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