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Post-agricultural Ecotones in Puerto Rico

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Ecotones Between Forest and Grassland

Abstract

The study of pastures and other ecotones recovering from agriculture—old fields—is important to world-wide social and environmental issues such as forest regeneration, forest ecosystem restoration, sustainability of agriculture, maintenance of biodiversity, and impacts of global climate change on forest dynamics. Furthermore these ecotones may serve as buffers between more pristine “primary” forest and urban/suburban areas (Brown and Lugo 1990a). Indeed because the amount of land area either converted to, or recovering from, agriculture is expected to only increase in the future everywhere on earth, studying the recovery of these areas will continue to be vital to human density.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Eda Melendez and her staff for their help with the LTER data sets, Maria Aponte for field assistance, and N.V.L. Brokaw for logistical support. I received support from grant DEB-0218039 from the National Science Foundation to the Institute of Tropical Ecosystem Studies, University of Puerto Rico, and the USDA Forest Service, International Institute of Tropical Forestry as part of the Long-Term Ecological Research Program in the Luquillo Experimental Forest. Additional support was provided by the Forest Service (U.S. Department of Agriculture) and the University of Puerto Rico.

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  1. Department of Biology, Oklahoma State University, Oklahoma City, OK, 73107, USA

    Randall W. Myster

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Correspondence to Randall W. Myster .

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  1. , Biology Department, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, 74078, Oklahoma, USA

    Randall W. Myster

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Myster, R.W. (2012). Post-agricultural Ecotones in Puerto Rico. In: Myster, R. (eds) Ecotones Between Forest and Grassland. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3797-0_6

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