James LeFrankie is in his own way a living symbol of how important a crossroads our isthmus is.
Those in the know realize that the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) has facilities across Panama, including its headquarters at the site of the old Tivoli Hotel in Ancon, the famous Barro Colorado Island (BCI) research station, marine labs on the Atlantic Side at Galeta Island and on the Amador Causeway, a new lab in Bocas and so on.
LeFrankie, who helped set up the renowned Barro Colorado Island 50-hectare plot study back in the 80s, is officially on the STRI staff. However, he lives in the Philippines, has been setting up and studying forest plots much like BCI's in several Southeast Asian countries, and came back to the Tupper Center on August 10 to talk about new findings from the tropical forest plots in Asia.
"STRI is a global organization," he commented at the beginning of his talk. What he didn't say, but was apparent from a glance at who was and was not in the audience, and even more obvious when one considers the nature of the relationship between the Panamanian government and STRI, which is a division of the US government's Smithsonian Institution, in recent years, is that relatively few Panamanians appreciate the way that STRI has made Panama into an important scientific crossroads.
Appreciated or not, there are certain things that we can learn and apply to this country from that status, and maybe a lot of things that don't apply.
As mentioned, the study techniques pioneered at BCI have been applied in other forests around the tropics. But as LeFrankie reported, in Asia they are finding that tropical forests are very different from what we see here. He highlighted studies at tiny plots in the mostly deforested city-state of Singapore, Malaysia's Lambir National Park and his newest project at Palanan, on the north end of the Philippine island of Luzon to illustrate the point.
Palanan, where he has set up a 16-hectare hilltop plot, is in the very wet (about five meters of rain per year) and "aseasonal" Sierra Madre mountains. At 17°N latitude it is more northerly than the other tropical forest plots that STRI and its fellow tropical research organizations have studied, and it's heavily affected by seasonal storms. There is no dominant species among the park's diverse flora and there are no large animals and few small ones.
In one breathtaking aerial photo, LeFrankie showed how a typhoon stripped the leaves from a the seaward side of a Sierra Madre ridge, leaving it brown, while the sheltered inland slope remained green. "We have done very little in typhoon-related research," he noted. But that seems about to change.
The Singapore forest fragment study, which began in 1993, centers around a two-hectare plot on a ridge in a park and a .4-hectare plot in the country's botanical gardens. There, the flora are not very diverse at all, there aren't too many animals and a lot of the birds are exotic, many of them descended from zoo escapees or pets that got away. Singapore's deforestation may be the best documented case in the tropics, as the British founded Singapore as a trading post in 1819 and kept fairly good records through the rest of the 19th century. The deforestation was so rapid and complete that in 1870 conservation efforts were begun, and there are good records of those, too.
What LeFrankie finds noteworthy about Singapore is that, although there has been a net species loss of about 20 percent since 1900, nowadays there is a great acceleration in forest dynamics --- the rate at which trees in a forest are born, grow and die --- but "almost nothing has been happening in terms of general diversity." He believes that although the wildlife of Singapore may have been devastated by human activity, the relatively poor species diversity is due to "various isolating effects" that in many cases have nothing to do with mankind.
Meanwhile in Malaysia, Lambir is now one of the tropical sites most studied by biologists. Scientists working on plots there are comparing factors like soil and altitude and how they affect various species and the same species. Because of a wide variation in ecological niches within the park, the fauna and flora are heterogeneous and the effects of different conditions can be more easily compared. However, LeFrankie opines that such research "has been taken about as far as it can."
In any case, he wonders about the extent to which there really are widespread species moving into many different niches, and predicts that DNA studies are going to revolutionize biogeography and subject the very concept of widespread species to serious challenges.
Taking a more global view, he notes that biologists have been looking for uniformity or similarity in tropical forests but instead finding that "these forests are not the same."
"When we look at some fundamental things we find that not only are they not similar, they're totally different.... When we overlay that with phylogeny [the study of species' evolution], it becomes even more interesting."
Gradually, LeFrankie said, a comparison among forests in Asia, Africa and the Americas is emerging. How species disperse, reproduce and fruit, and what the pollinating symbionts are seem to be very different. Maybe, he suggests, a counterintuitive research strategy of looking for differences rather than similarities might turn out to be more instructive.
Also in this section:
More differences than similarities in tropical forests
Do New World tropical forests reflect climate change?
Studying forest fragmentation's effects through insects
