The rapid loss of old-growth tropical forests around the world calls for an urgent need to understand and forecast the importance of secondary forests for the local, regional, and global conservation of biodiversity and critical ecosystem services. Present and future societies and economies will depend on the natural capital in secondary forests, which are rapidly becoming the most dominant forests across the tropics. This grant will provide funding for 25 U.S. investigators to attend a 3-day workshop on tropical forest succession at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Morelia, Mexico during October 2009. The workshop is co-organized by Miguel Martinez-Ramos and Horacio Paz from UNAM?s Centro de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas (CIEco). Workshop participants comprise approximately 50 senior, mid-level, and young investigators from eight countries in the Americas and Europe. Participants will divide into five working groups focusing on different aspects of secondary forest regeneration: 1) species interactions and demography; 2) functional traits of species and ecosystem processes in secondary forests; 3) species composition within stands and landscapes; 4) effects of human activities on forest regeneration; and 5) secondary forest detection using remote sensing. Each working group will synthesize the current state of knowledge and guiding paradigms, identify major debates and uncertainties; discuss limitations and challenges of existing research approaches, and identify future research directions. The documents emerging from these working groups will provide a basis for planning an integrated, internationally based research and training program on secondary forest regeneration in the New World tropics. The workshop will also expand and enhance the activities of existing international tropical forest research networks, as well as the U.S. and Mexico Long Term Ecological Research programs.
