Night in the forest – what is this tree, filling a gap in the canopy? Though it may look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, it is actually Cecropia schreberiana, locally known as yagrumo. This is one of the more common species in the Neotropics, easily identified by its distinctive leaves: many lobes, with…

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…