Seasonally dry tropical forests are distributed across Latin America and the Caribbean and are highly threatened, with less than 10% of their original extent remaining in many countries. Using 835 inventories covering 4660 species of woody plants, we show marked floristic turnover among inventories and regions, which may be higher than in other neotropical biomes, such as savanna. Such high floristic turnover indicates that numerous conservation areas across many countries will be needed to protect the full diversity of tropical dry forests. Our results provide a scientific framework within which national decision-makers can contextualize the floristic significance of their dry forest at a regional and continental scale. N eotropical seasonally dry forest (dry forest) is a biome with a wide and fragmented distribution, found from Mexico to Argentina and throughout the Caribbean (1, 2) ( Fig. 1). It is one of the most threatened tropical forests in the world (3), with less than 10% of its original extent remaining in many countries (4).Following other authors (5, 6), we define dry forest as having a closed canopy, distinguishing it from more open, grass-rich savanna. It occurs on fertile soils where the rainfall is less thañ 1800 mm per year, with a period of 3 to 6 months receiving less than 100 mm per month (5-7), during which the vegetation is mostly deciduous. Seasonally dry areas, especially in Peru and Mexico, were home to pre-Columbian civilizations, so human interaction with dry forest has a long history (8). The climates and fertile soils of dry forest regions have led to higher human population densities and an increasing demand for energy and land, enhancing degradation (9). More recently, destruction of dry forest has been accelerated by intensive cultivation of crops, such as sugar cane, rice and soy, or by conversion to pasture for cattle.Dry forest is in a critical state because so little of it is intact, and of the remnant areas, little is protected (3). For example, only 1.2% of the total Caatinga region of dry forest in Brazil is fully protected compared with 9.9% of the Brazilian Amazon (10). Conservation actions are urgently needed to protect dry forest's unique biodiversity-many plant species and even genera are restricted to it and reflect an evolutionary history confined to this biome (1).We evaluate the floristic relationships of the disjunct areas of neotropical dry forest and highlight those that contain the highest diversity and endemism of woody plant species. We also explore woody plant species turnover across geographic space among dry forests. Our results provide a framework to allow the conservation significance of each separate major region of dry forest to be assessed at a continental scale. Our analyses are based on a subset of a data set of 1602 inventories made in dry forest and related semi-deciduous forests from Mexico and the Caribbean to Argentina and Paraguay that covers 6958 woody species, which has been compiled by the Latin American and Caribbean Seasonally Dry Tropica...

Resilient secondary tropical forests? Although deforestation is rampant across the tropics, forest has a strong capacity to regrow on abandoned lands. These “secondary” forests may increasingly play important roles in biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and landscape restoration. Poorter et al . analyzed the patterns of recovery in forest attributes (related to soil, plant functioning, structure, and diversity) in 77 secondary forest sites in the Americas and West Africa. They found that different attributes recovered at different rates, with soil recovering in less than a decade and species diversity and biomass recovering in little more than a century. The authors discuss how these findings can be applied in efforts to promote forest restoration. —AMS

No abstract

Tropical dry forests (TDF) are known to be resource‐limited due to a marked seasonality in precipitation. However, TDF are also shaped by factors such as solar radiation, wind speed, soil fertility, and land‐cover transformation. Together, these factors may determine different gradients of environmental harshness that are likely to drive changes in plant community attributes. Here, we evaluated the effects of environmental harshness on plant community diversity and structure of Colombian TDF, based on floristic and environmental data from 15 1‐ha permanent plots. We also analyzed these effects on legumes species only (including both deciduous and non‐deciduous species), deciduous species only (including both legumes and non‐legumes species), and on the whole community excluding either legumes or deciduous separately. Drier conditions and higher land‐cover transformation had the strongest negative effects on species diversity, basal area (BA), and canopy height. Soil fertility, on the contrary, did not have a significant effect on any of the evaluated response variables. Interestingly, legumes maintained their diversity and BA along the climatic gradient, while deciduous species were negatively affected by drier conditions and by an increase in secondary vegetation at the landscape level. Our results suggest that although TDF are limited by water availability, land‐cover transformation strongly increases environmental harshness. Yet, both legumes and deciduous species were differentially impacted by climatic and land transformation variables. Thus, to better understand TDF plant community attributes, it is necessary to consider these gradients and to disentangle their effects on different plant functional groups. Abstract in Spanish is available with online material.