Remotely sensed forest ecosystem resilience to environmental change in Mesoamerica
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Known as one of the main world megadiverse areas, Mesoamerica hosts a large amount of percent of the world’s biodiversity, and Mesoamerican forests are teeming with a variety of plant species. Nevertheless, Mesoamerica is currently undergoing one of the most extensive and severe droughts in decades, while Mesoamerican forests resilience to recent severe and long-lasting droughts is unclear yet pressingly to be examined. Therefore, our research focuses on understanding how forests in Mesoamerica are responding to a changing environment. Based on the vegetation censuses and plant functional traits data, we will determine the community-weighted means (CWM), community-weighted variance (CWV), above-ground biomass (AGB), and functional diversity (FD) metrics at the plot level across time, we will investigate changes in the CWM, CWV, AGB, and FD and will also determine the possible drivers of such changes. Thus, the project focuses on understanding the capacity of forests in Mesoamerica to recover from extreme environmental changes. A second part of this project will investigate to what extent we can assess forest ecosystem resilience to environmental changes in Mesoamerican forests by means of satellite remote sensing and time-series analysis methods. We will explore the possibility of linking the local spectral signatures of canopy traits to the spectral signal captured by the satellite imagery. If successful we will be able to produce fine spatial resolution maps of plant functional traits and functional diversity in forests in Mesoamerica across time.