How do you access the top of the trees in a vast expanse of rainforest, where no one has built a canopy tower? We are interested in collecting leaves from high places and low places, in order to assess how variable tree functional diversity really is in this forest. Our solution: tree pruning poles –…

This is how the inside of our field station accommodations look. Today we collected seventeen leaf and branch samples from ten tree species, in order to make quantitative measurements of their functional diversity – for example, how dense is the wood, or how much carbon is allocated to the leaves? We are testing several hypotheses…

Today we climbed higher into the Luquillo mountains – all the way to the top of Pico El Yunque. At these elevations the tabonuco rainforest (named for the dominant species, Dacryodes excelsa – more on this another post) transitions into cloud forest and elfin forest. At these elevations the forest is always in the clouds, so…

What is the fate of dead wood and fallen leaves? A large fraction of a forest’s carbon is stored in these materials at any given time. But this dead material does not continually accrete – it is transformed into other forms by decomposers, and made available to other organisms. Large logs may last for only…