Dr. Stephen Hubbell wins prestigious International Prize for Biology

CTFS-ForestGEO co-founder Stephen P. Hubbell will receive this year’s International Prize for Biology, awarded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The committee on the International Prize, chaired by Dr. Takashi Sugimura, announced its selection earlier last week for the specialized field of “Biology of Biodiversity”. The International Prize for Biology is one of the highest scientific honors given by Japan. The prize is granted to Dr. Hubbell for his exceptional contributions to biological and ecological research.

Dr. Hubbell’s long and remarkable career covers a wide-range of research topics including tropical plant ecology, resource competition, animal behavior, and theoretical ecology. He has authored four books and more than 220 scientific papers. He is perhaps most widely known for his unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography that offers a nontraditional explanation for the diversity and relative abundance of species in ecological communities. The theory has spawned a significant growth in research in theoretical ecology.

Currently Dr. Hubbell is a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Life Sciences Division at University of California, Los Angeles. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advance­ment of Science. He is also founding chairman of the National Council for Science and the Environment, an organization whose mission is to improve the scientific basis of environmental decision-making.

In 1980 Dr. Hubbell helped establish the Barro Colorado Island forest plot in Panama, the first of CTFS-ForestGEO’s sites.

BCI 2010 Census Data Online

We are pleased to announce that the data from the 7^th census of the 50-hectare plot on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, are now available. The data can be downloaded at: http://ctfs.arnarb.harvard.edu/webatlas/datasets/bci/.

The 7^th BCI census was supported by National Science Foundation grant DEB-0948585 to Stephen Hubbell and the Center for Tropical Forest Science of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Rolando Pérez and Salomón Aguilar led the fieldwork for the recensus. Suzanne Lao coordinated the entry, checking and management of the data. Rick Condit oversaw the implementation of the census.

The massive task of recensusing the plot would not have been possible without the efforts of many people who have worked on the BCI 2010 census as well as prior censuses. Thanks and congratulations to all involved!

For more information, please contact Dr. Richard Condit at conditr@gmail.com

Seven Censuses over 30 years on BCI

Three decades after Stephen Hubbell and Robin Foster established the first plot in what would become the CTFS-SIGEO network, researchers and field technicians recently completed the seventh census of the 50-ha plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama. The 1980 census on BCI marked the beginning of CTFS-SIGEO, pioneering the use of long-term large-scale tree-censusing techniques that researchers have replicated in forests across the globe. Today, CTFS-SIGEO comprises a network of 40 plots in 21 countries in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. The network involves hundreds of scientists and dozens of institutions around the world working together to study the growth and survival of 4.5 million trees of 8,500 species.

The following figures based on seven censuses (1980-2010) at BCI illustrate the extraordinary scale and intensity of CTFS-SIGEO’s research program.

1,836,533 diameter measurements of stems ≥1 cm

391,278 individual trees counted

174,435 tree deaths

155,955 trees recruited

17,500 person-days of fieldwork

85 person-years of fieldwork

130 people involved in the 7 censuses

This enormous undertaking could not have been possible without the hard work of the many people who have worked at BCI over the past 30 years. Congratulations to all involved!