EcoRe3 Neotropics paper

A new paper from PAGES' EcoRe3 working group uses 30 long-term, high-resolution palaeoecological records from Mexico, Central and South America to address two hypotheses regarding possible drivers of resilience in tropical forests as measured in terms of recovery rates from previous disturbances.

To test these hypotheses, authors, led by Carole Adolf, applied a threshold approach to identify past disturbances to forests within each sequence. They then compared the recovery rates to these events with pollen richness before the event.

The authors also compared recovery rates of each site with a measure of present resilience in the region as demonstrated by measuring global vegetation persistence to climatic perturbations using satellite imagery.

Access the Biology Letters paper "Identifying drivers of forest resilience in long-term records from the Neotropics" here.

The paper is also a contribution to the Biology Letters special feature 'Ecological resilience: from theory to empirical observations using long-term datasets' organized by EcoRe3. Access all the special feature papers here.

Find out more about the EcoRe3 working group here.