Caribbean Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program
The Caribbean Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program produces traditional forest inventories and conducts research in all of the IITF research areas: ecosystems, stand and landscape dynamics, and wildlife biodiversity. The Program is jointly managed by the USFS Southern Research Station and IITF. The program inventories forests in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI); advises on or conducts inventories in other countries; and builds on Puerto Rico and USVI datasets to build ecological models and for research in landscape ecology and remote sensing. Research focuses on complex tropical landscapes.
Example research topics: the dynamics and spatial distributions of tropical forest trees, communities and species diversity from stand to landscape scales, including communities with naturalized (exotic) tree species; forest nutrient pools and atmospheric greenhouse gas fluxes; forest biodiversity conservation including remote sensing of wildlife habitat characteristics; potential impacts of climate and land-cover change on forests and watersheds; and the influence of current and historical landscape patterns on these attributes and processes.
CaribbeanFIA_Current Studies_Summaries.pdf
(Keywords: biogeochemistry-nutrient cycling, Land-cover change, Biodiversity, Land-use change, alien species, carbon cycle, remote sensing, Species turnover, Land use, Succession, Tropical ecology, landscape ecology, secondary succession, Spatial modeling, flora, Landscape dynamics, Puerto Rico, exotic species, Caribbean, Urban growth, Tropical forest conservation
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| Eileen Helmer | |
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2008 Diversity and biomass of tropical forests cleared for land development To learn more about the tropical forests that are cleared when urban and residential development spreads, scientists assembled the most comprehensive time series of land cover maps to date for the island of Puerto Rico. They learned that most of the forests cleared for land development from 1991 to 2000, 55%, were young (113 yr). ... |
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2008 Contribution of dead wood to biomass and carbon stocks in the Caribbean: St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands |
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2008 Factors influencing spatial pattern in tropical forest clearance and stand age: implications for carbon storage and species diversity Little is known about the tropical forests that undergo clearing as urban/built-up and other developed lands spread. This study uses remote sensing-based maps of Puerto Rico , multinomial logit models and forest inventory data to explain patterns of forest age and the age of forests cleared for land development and assess their implications for forest carbon storage and tree species richness. ... |
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2006 Development of equations for predicting Puerto Rican subtropical dry forest biomass and volume |
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2008 Mapping U.S. forest biomass using nationwide forest inventory data and moderate resolution information |
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2003 Diversity and composition of tropical secondary forests recovering from large-scale clearing: results from the 1990 inventory in Puerto Rico The extensive recovery from agricultural clearing of Puerto Rican forests over the past half-century provides a good opportunity to study tropical forest recovery on a landscape scale. Using ordination and regression techniques, we analyzed forest inventory data from across Puerto Ricos moist and wet secondary forests to evaluate their species composition and whether the landscape structure of older forest affected tree species composition of recovering forests at this scale. ... |
