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.…

Broadway Boulevard – a paved multi-lane road, cutting a straight path across fifteen miles of desert, bringing the city uncomfortably close to the Rincon and Tucson mountains. This is progress, of a sort. Sixty years ago, the city would have been scarcely visible, with none of these highways or towers yet constructed. There would have…