Submitted by Lara Marie Kueppers on
Predicting forest responses to climate change and disturbance requires understanding and predicting tree regeneration. The allocation of carbon to reproduction (needed to create flowers, fruits, and seeds) is the first step in tree regeneration. Although crucial for regeneration, this process is difficult to observe and poorly understood, and therefore represents a potentially large source of bias within vegetation models. This project will contribute to an ongoing effort to better understand reproductive allocation in tropical forest ecosystems, and incorporate findings into a vegetation demographic model (FATES).
Students will build on a previous meta-data synthesis, which identifies forest sites for which all necessary datasets are available to estimate reproductive allocation at the ecosystem level. The goal of this project is to collect raw site data from publications and/or ecological monitoring networks, and to compare benchmarks for reproductive allocation across tropical forests.
Proficiency in R and/or familiarity with Excel, background or interest in tropical ecology