PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 69: Forest Ecology IV: Communities.
Presiding: D Gavin
Thursday, August 7. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, SITCC Meeting Room 200.
A tropical forest meta-analysis: Ecological and conservation findings.
Niles, John*,1, 2, Kremen, Claire3, Fay, John4, 1 Climate and Biodiversity Alliance, Washington, DC2 University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA3 Prinecton University, Princeton, NJ4 Stanford University, Stanford, CA
ABSTRACT- We conducted a meta-analysis of ecological and socio-economic parameters within the tropical forest biome. We built and analyzed a GIS database using layers describing biological importance, carbon, threat, impact, ecosystem type, and historical project implementation by country. The goal of our research was to demonstrate broad ecological patterns, such as the relationship between perceived biological value and carbon across the tropical forest landscape. We also revealed important conservation findings such as: 1) areas of congruence and discrepancy within global carbon and biological-importance models, 2) specific areas of robust conservation importance and the estimated above ground carbon they contain, 3) areas of consensus threat, and 4) important differences by country of historical project implementation rates. We confirmed our hypothesis that high-impacted areas have lower carbon than low-impact areas. We also demonstrated that the consensus areas of threat do not have signifcantly different carbon values than areas not imminently threatened. For conservation, we identified almost 7 million hectares of tropical forest that: 1) are in countries with relatively high project implementation success rates, are considered consensus areas of high biological importance, have relatively low impact and are threatened. These areas contain almost 1.5 billion tons of carbon and should be global priorities for conservation. Conservation policy recommendations are discussed based on these new understandings of the ecology, history and social context of the tropical forest biome.
Key words: carbon, meta-analysis, tropical forests, biodiversity