Tomas Carlo
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Ecology & Evolution
When tropical land is cleared and then left to recover, what decides which trees grow back, how diverse the new forest becomes, and how much carbon it eventually stores? Tropical forests help regulate Earth's climate through water cycling and their large capacity to absorb and hold atmospheric carbon, and they face widespread threats.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
tropical forests
forest succession
seed dispersal
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test how fruit selection and seed dispersal by frugivores interact with the functional traits and phylogenetic relatedness of pioneer plants to shape community assembly in early-successional tropical forest, using a replicated field experiment.
- Examine how dispersal processes combined with pioneer plant functional and phylogenetic traits affect the genetic diversity of later colonizing species, and how that diversity translates into differences in plant survival and growth.
- Determine how biotic filtering by frugivores and successional community traits influence, or are influenced by, soil microbiome composition and the nutrient pools and carbon transformation processes microbes control.
More about the research
One underappreciated driver of recovery is animal behavior: fruit-eating animals choose some fruits over others and carry those seeds to new ground, which can set the trajectory of an entire regrowing forest.
Why it matters
Forest restoration is a major tool for conserving biodiversity and capturing atmospheric carbon, but it is expensive. By showing how seed-dispersing animals steer which trees return and how soil microbes process the resulting carbon and nutrients, this work aims to deliver practical principles that reduce restoration costs while maximizing biodiversity conservation and carbon storage in restored forests.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Paulo Brando
Yale University, CT·Ecology & Evolution
Extend a 21-year record of tree growth, mortality, biomass, canopy cover, soil moisture and forest–atmosphere carbon and water exchange at Tanguro, Brazil, to 27 years, to track recovery after repeated fire, drought and windthrow.
Stefan Schnitzer
Marquette University, WI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether lianas (woody vines) act as a keystone guild that keeps dominant tree species from crowding out weaker ones, using a large-scale liana-removal experiment in a tropical forest running since 2008.
Christopher Swan
University of Maryland-Baltimore County, MD·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether demographic stochasticity, random variation in births, deaths and local extinctions, shapes community assembly more strongly in tropical streams than temperate ones, given temperature-dependent differences in population growth rates and densities.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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