The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Christopher Baraloto to work with Dr. Damien Bonal at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in Kourou, French Guiana.
This project will join a community ecologist (the PI) with an experienced tropical forest ecophysiologist in French Guiana (the host) to examine seedling functional morphology within and among five genera of tropical rain forest trees. The project involves two components: a trait screening manipulation to examine associations between seedling ecological and ecophysiological traits; and a demographic survey of the local taxa to examine associations between functional morphology and seedling recruitment. The project represents two major contributions to the study of tropical forests. First, it is one of the first approaches to incorporate phylogenetic relationships into the study of tropical tree functional ecology. Second, the project is one of the first to link data from controlled experiments of ecophysiological parameters with performance under field conditions. These strengths represent the potential for a major advancement in tropical forest ecology.
Dr. Bonal has been conducting similar trait screening in French Guiana for more than five years, and this project will build on this research.
