Today we took a holiday – doing fieldwork seven days each week blunts our enthusiasm for the forest. So we made a short journey to Culebra, a small island to the east of Puerto Rico. Culebra is a very dry island, with a very different flora than our rainforest. It is so dry that there…

The forest here is full of sierra palms – Prestoea acuminata var. montana. How large is each leaf? We need to know for our study of functional diversity. You might think that the individual sword-shaped tissues are leaves, but actually the entire palm frond comprises a single leaf with many leaflets. The leaflets are each…

Valentine’s Day – why not celebrate with flowers? Here are two species from the cloud forest, photographed in a spirit of love and friendship. First, a plant in the Melastomataceae family, with four-petaled flowers. And second, Begonia decandra (Begoniaceae). This latter flower is interesting. What you might think are petals are actually sepals, which normally are…

How should a tree invest its resources in branches and leaves? These are expensive tissues to construct, and must return their carbon investment through photosynthetic returns. Some species have leaves spread throughout the canopy to capitalize on sunflecks (short bursts of sunlight from the high canopy) or shady conditions. Others have leaves only at the…