Modeling successional pathways of secondary Atlantic forests in the face of climate change using taxonomic, functional, phylogenetic and landscape information

Abstract

Secondary forests are expanding worldwide as land use changes, farms are abandoned, and legal and market pressures increase for land holders to reforest or set aside land for forest regeneration. The application of models to envision the development and dynamics of forests are becoming very important especially under different scenarios of climate change. However, forest models have seldom been employed for tropical forests and they are even more rarely applied to secondary forests. The present proposal aims at applying a landscape forest gap model (LandClim) to data we collected on the species taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic composition, diameter, and height of trees and shrubs occurring in semideciduous Atlantic forest patches that differ in age, land use history and current surrounding land uses in the Corumbataí Basin, São Paulo. We aim to collaborate with the Forest Ecology Group of the ETH, lead by Dr. Harald Bugmann, to learn how to apply the landscape forest gap model LandCLim, developed by Dr. Bugmann, to our dataset. It will be the first time that this forest model is applied to secondary tropical forest ecosystems. Results from the model will help increase our understanding of the successional pathways the forest patches will follow thru time and according to different climate scenarios. Secondary forests in fragmented landscapes play an important role in water and biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and erosion control, thus modeling their dynamics becomes really important to adequately manage and conserve these forest patches and the ecosystem services they provide in the long term. (AU)