Please join the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative for a virtual seminar presented by Daniel Zuleta, Postdoctoral Fellow at ForestGEO and NGEE-Tropics.

His seminar is on "Tree Damage as an Ecological Process."

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Abstract: Forests are key to mitigating climate change. However, large uncertainties remain on how these ecosystems will respond to future environmental changes, especially in the tropics, where the high species diversity implies different responses to a particular stressor. Here I present evidence of a key, but underappreciated, ecological process in the dynamics of tropical forests: tree damage. I will present several pieces of evidence showing the importance of tree damage for tree mortality and small-scale biomass losses based on several censuses across seven tropical forest plots of the ForestGEO network.

Bio: Daniel Zuleta is a Postdoctoral fellow working on tropical forest mortality with ForestGEO, NGEE–Tropics, and the Alliance for Tropical Forest Science (ATFS). His current research focuses on understanding the mechanisms driving tropical forest biomass losses to improve predictions of forest response to environmental changes. Daniel is one of the PIs of the Amacayacu Forest Dynamics Plot, a 25-ha plot located in the Northwestern Amazon (Colombia), where he carried out his Doctoral dissertation. As a postdoc fellow, he coordinates the ForestGEO annual mortality and damage surveys, a pantropical program that aims to collect tree-level data related to potential mechanisms of mortality and forest biomass loss. He is also leading the ATFS Mortality Working Group, a multi-network group that aims to better understand the patterns of tree mortality across the tropics.