This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY 2004. The goal of the fellowship is to increase the participation of minority scientists at the postdoctoral level and to prepare them for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training and research of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. It is expected that Fellows supported through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce.
The research and training plan is entitled "Applications of spatially explicit models to the sustainable harvesting and restoration of tropical forest ecosystems." The biological wealth of tropical forest ecosystems is threatened by the selective harvesting of timber and non-timber products (NTFPs) such as fruits and leaves. Sustainable management of harvested species requires balancing harvesting and the ecology of tropical forests, in concert with knowledge about spatial arrangement of populations and landscape features with respect to patterns of human resource use. The research objective is to inform the sustainable management of tropical forests by creating models of the harvesting of tropical forest products that consider the spatial arrangement of harvesting regimes in relation to the disturbance-mediated spatial distribution of the tropical forest resource using mangroves as models for timber and under-story palms as models for NTFP harvesting in Mexico.
