Presented by Dr. Jennifer Powers, College of Biological Sciences and Dr. Forrest Fleischman, Dept. of Forest Resources
While tropical forests are often thought of as expansive seas of green trees that extend as far as the eye can see, the reality is that most tropical landscapes now exist as dynamic mosaics of land uses. Trees in these “mosaic landscapes” are present in remnant patches of primary forests, regenerating in young secondary forests, planted in home gardens or plantations, isolated as shade trees in pastures, or propagated in fence rows. Ecologists typically approach these landscapes through the conceptual frameworks of forest fragmentation, landscape ecology, and secondary succession, while minimizing the role of humans in mediating tree population dynamics. Similarly, social scientists approach these landscapes by studying the role of people, markets, policies, and institutions in tropical forest management, while not acknowledging the reciprocal interactions between human and ecological processes. In this Brown Bag Seminar, we will discuss our newly formed Working Group on Mosaic Landscapes. Our goals are to develop a robust and predictive framework to understand the ecological and social processes that affect trees in mosaic landscapes by integrating social science and ecology.