How glamorous is the day-to-day life of a field ecologist? The answer depends on how much you enjoy being uncomfortable in beautiful places. Here’s a vignette of a wonderful day in the forest. We begin the morning by consulting maps of the forest dynamics plot, planning locations to install our equipment and make our forest…

When you think of the rainforest, you probably imagine a scene much like the above – lush vegetation, with light filtering down from a high canopy to the understorey. Here at Luquillo the forest is dominated by the Prestoea montana palms shown here. But this image is only part of a larger story of land-use.…

  Today we had our first look at the Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot – a 320 meter x 500 meter section of forest in which an incredible thing has been accomplished: the identity, size, and position of every tree (with at least a 1 cm diameter) has been recorded. This is no small feat in…

What constrains life in the rainforest? Here we see plants growing upon plants growing upon plants – nearly every part of this tree trunk is covered with another organism. Ecosystems appear in miniature the closer one looks. So what prevents a baroque elaboration of this arrangement to infinite numbers of infinitely small plants? Resource limitation.…