Perspectives on Ecology: Tropical forest diversity -- The plot thickens

The tropical forests of the world support a huge number of tree species--more tree species are found in 0.5 km super(2) of some tropical forests than in all of North America or Europe. Although tropical ecologists have put forward a number of hypotheses to explain this species diversity, testing these hypotheses has been hampered by the lack of field studies with sufficiently large long-term data sets. To fill this void, the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has formed a network of permanent forest sites in the tropics--the forest dynamics plot (FDP) network--that are between 15 and 52 ha in size. Two decades' worth of results from the 16 FDP sites were discussed at a workshop on tropical forest diversity in Singapore. One goal of the workshop was to determine from the FDP data sets the factors that are most crucial for maintaining species diversity in tropical forests.