Ecosystem Ecology and Forest Dynamics

The earth’s surface supports living organisms and their environments to form the biosphere, a thin film of life around the planet. Organisms participate in interacting systems or communities, and these communities are coupled to their environments by the transfer of matter and energy and by movements of air, water, and organisms. Human activities in Monteverde and elsewhere can drastically alter forest ecosystems. Textbooks on ecosystem ecology typically include such topics as community structure and composition (including plant growth forms, vertical structure, niche space, species diversity), communities and environments (species distributions along environmental gradients, community classification, succession), production (food chains and webs, decomposition and detritus, photosynthesis), and nutrient cycling (mineral nutrition of organisms, soil development, biogeochemistry). Our understanding of tropical ecosystem ecology generally falls short of what we know of other aspects of tropical biology. There are far more studies concerning population biology, autecology, and life history of tropical organisms than nutrient cycling, productivity, and landscape ecology. This pattern is true in Monteverde and in such well-studied tropical forests as La Selva, Barro Colorado Island (BCI), and the Luquillo National Forest (Lugo and Lowe 1995, McDade et al. 1994). Logistical blocks to ecosystem research exist because collaborating teams of scientists are typically needed to tackle the multiple disciplines that ecosystem-level questions require, which demands a large infrastructure and budget. Temporal problems exist because ecosystem-level phenomena (e.g., tree mortality and forest regeneration) may involve time scales longer than the life of a single granting period or lifetime of a researcher. A strong academic base for ecosystem ecology is lacking because the pool of existing studies is too small to draw patterns and extrapolate trends. These obstacles have not often been overcome in Monteverde. No Monteverde institution has provided the infrastructure to support ecosystem research (e.g., laboratory facilities, meteorological station, technical library). Some community members have negative feelings about experimental manipulations and destructive sampling sometimes needed to answer ecosystem ecology questions. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) courses were in Monteverde and in such well-studied tropical forests as La Selva, Barro Colorado Island (BCI), and the Luquillo National Forest (Lugo and Lowe 1995, McDade et al. 1994).