Contrary to large areas in Amazonia of tropical moist forests with a pronounced dry season, tropical wet forests in Costa Rica do not depend on deep roots to maintain an evergreen forest canopy through the year. At our Costa Rican tropical wet forest sites, we found a large carbon stock in the subsoil of deeply… More

Accurate estimates of the total biomass in terrestrial vegetation are important for carbon dynamics studies at a variety of scales. Although aboveground biomass is difficult to quantify over large areas using traditional techniques, lidar remote sensing holds great promise for biomass estimation because it directly measures components of canopy structure such as canopy height and… More

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are mutualists with plant roots that are proposed to enhance plant community diversity. Models indicate that AM fungal communities could maintain plant diversity in forests if functionally different communities are spatially separated. In this study we assess the spatial and temporal distribution of the AM fungal community in a wet tropical… More

Difficulty in balancing the global carbon budget has lead to increased attention on tropical forests, which have been estimated to account for up to one third of global gross primary production. Whether tropical forests are sources, sinks, or neutral with respect to their carbon balance with the atmosphere remains unclear. To address this issue, estimates… More

Quantification of forest structure is important for developing a better understanding of how forest ecosystems function. Additionally, estimation of forest structural attributes, such as aboveground biomass (AGBM), is an important step in identifying the amount of carbon in terrestrial vegetation pools and is central to global carbon cycle studies. Although current remote sensing techniques recover… More