Tropical forest ecology in the anthropocene

Abstract

The term Anthropocene refers to the current period during which human impacts are universal. Even “pristine” tropical forests have been affected by climate change and rising carbon dioxide levels, and most surviving forests have been impacted by hunting and/or logging. Deforestation for crops and pasture is a more drastic impact, since the process of recovery is both dispersal and establishment limited, with recovery times increasing if prolonged cultivation or pasture use has degraded the soil. Tropical ecologists must now work in heterogeneous landscapes consisting of forest patches of varied size, history, and composition embedded in human-dominated landscapes in which alien species are increasingly prominent. They must work at the landscape scale or above and make use of new tools, such as high-resolution satellite data.