Paul-Camilo Zalamea

University of South Florida | USF · Department of Integrative Biology

Patterns of leaf production and leaf fall directly influence leaf area index and forest productivity. Here, we focused on Cecropia sciadophylla individuals inhabiting the extremes of the gradient in seasonality in rainfall at which C. sciadophylla occurs. In Colombia and French Guiana we compared the intra-annual variation in leaf production as wel...

Seed dormancy in plants can have a significant impact on their ecology. Recent work by Rojas-Villa and Quijano-Abril (2023) classified the seed dormancy class in 14 plant species from the Andean forests of Colombia by using germination trials and several microscopy techniques to describe seed anatomy and morphology. The authors conclude that Cecrop...

Pioneer trees require high‐light environments for successful seedling establishment. Consequently, seeds of these species often persist in the soil seed bank (SSB) for periods ranging from several weeks to decades. How they survive despite extensive pressure from seed predators and soil‐borne pathogens remains an intriguing question. This study aim...

As currently circumscribed, Acrogenospora (Acrogenosporaceae, Minutisphaerales, Dothideomycetes) is a genus of saprobic hyphomycetes with distinctive conidia. Although considered common and cosmopolitan, the genus is poorly represented by sequence data, and no neotropical representatives are present in public sequence databases. Consequently, Acrog...

Cecropia is a group of fast-growing pioneer trees that are important in forest regeneration and a common ant-plant mutualism in the Neotropics. To investigate the evolution of mutualism between Cecropia and associated ants, a phylogenetic framework is necessary. Cecropia species are difficult to distinguish morphologically and conventional genetic...

Tropical forests account for more than half of the above-ground carbon on planet earth. Changes in species and trait composition resulting from climate change may strongly influence this carbon pool and therefore the global carbon cycle. We highlight how climate change may impact forest regeneration processes in tropical wet forests by altering the...

Animals, such as termites, have largely been overlooked as global-scale drivers of biogeochemical cycles 1,2 , despite site-specific findings 3,4 . Deadwood turnover, an important component of the carbon cycle, is driven by multiple decay agents. Studies have focused on temperate systems 5,6 , where microbes dominate decay ⁷ . Microbial decay is se...

Previous theoretical work has highlighted the potential for natural enemies to mediate the coexistence of species with similar life histories via density‐dependent effects on survivorship. For plant pathogens to play this role, they must differ in their ability to infect or induce disease in different host plant species. In tropical forests charact...

Many plants depend on animals for seed dispersal, and ants commonly fill this role. We examined whether heterogeneity in ant community composition among sites, between above‐ and belowground foraging guilds, or between seasons predicts observed variation in seed removal rates for 12 nonmyrmecochorous Neotropical pioneer tree species on Barro Colora...

Many plants depend on animals for seed dispersal, and ants commonly fill this role. We examined if heterogeneity in ant community composition among sites, between above-and below-ground foraging guilds, or between seasons predicts observed variation in seed removal rates for 12 nonmyrmecochorous Neotropical pioneer tree species on Barro Colorado Is...

Plant defense theory explores how plants invest in defenses against natural enemies but has focused primarily on the traits expressed by juvenile and mature plants. Here we describe the diverse ways in which seeds are chemically and physically defended. We suggest that through associations with other traits, seeds are likely to exhibit defense synd...

Tropical forest productivity is often thought to be limited by soil phosphorus (P) availability. Phosphorus availability might therefore constrain potential increases in growth as the atmospheric CO2 concentration increases, yet there is little experimental evidence with which to evaluate this hypothesis. We hypothesized that while all species woul...

Plant-associated fungi often harbor endohyphal bacteria (EHB) that modulate fungal phenotypes. We quantified the effects of EHB on interactions between fungi and seeds of neotropical pioneer trees, which fungi colonize naturally in forest soil. Seeds were exposed to six fungal isolates that harbored EHB, and to clones of those fungi from which EHB...

Seeds of tropical pioneer trees have chemical and physical characteristics that determine their capacity to persist in the soil seed bank. These traits allow seeds to survive in the soil despite diverse predators and pathogens, and to germinate and recruit even decades after dispersal. Defenses in seedlings and adult plants often are described in t...

Significance The remarkable diversity of trees in tropical forests is thought to be maintained by natural enemies such as fungal pathogens, which must exhibit sufficient host specificity to differentially impact survival of co-occurring host species. Little is known about the specificity of fungi that infect seeds of tropical trees. Here we show th...

Primary dispersal agents move seeds from the maternal plant to the soil surface where they are often moved again by secondary dispersal agents. However, the extent to which different species in the same location experience secondary dispersal is often unknown despite the importance of this mechanism for determining recruitment opportunities and con...

Polyphenols are one of the most common groups of secondary metabolites in plants and thought to play a key role in enhancing plant fitness by protecting plants against enemies. Although enemy‐inflicted mortality at the seed stage can be an important regulator of plant populations and a key determinant of community structure, few studies have assess...

It was recently proposed that boron might be the most important nutrient structuring tree species distributions in tropical forests. Here we combine observational and experimental studies to test this hypothesis for lowland tropical forests of Panama. Plant‐available boron is uniformly low in tropical forest soils of Panama and is not significantly...

Interactions between fungi and tropical trees help shape some of the most biodiverse communities on earth. These interactions occur in the presence of additional microbes that can modify fungal phenotypes, such as endohyphal bacteria (EHB). Here we examine the occurrence, diversity, and taxonomic composition of EHB in fungi that colonize seeds and...

Soils influence tropical forest composition at regional scales. In Panama, data on tree communities and underlying soils indicate that species frequently show distributional associations to soil phosphorus. To understand how these associations arise, we combined a pot experiment to measure seedling responses of 15 pioneer species to phosphorus addi...

Germination from the soil seed bank (SSB) is an important determinant of species composition in tropical forest gaps, with seed persistence in the SSB allowing trees to recruit even decades after dispersal. The capacity to form a persistent SSB is often associated with physical dormancy, where seed coats are impermeable at the time of dispersal. Ge...

Ant‐mediated seed dispersal has evolved multiple times in many regions around the world, affecting plant distributions through both primary and secondary dispersal. Most research investigating the chemical cues associated with ant‐mediated seed dispersal has focused on dispersal of myrmecochourous plants. Myrmecochorous plants have food bodies call...

Abstract Many organisms exhibit distinct breeding seasons tracking food availability. If conspecific populations inhabit areas that experience different temporal cycles in food availability spurred by variation in precipitation regimes, then they should display asynchronous breeding seasons. Thus, such populations might exhibit a temporal barrier t...

The seed stage is often critical in determining the regeneration success of plants. Seeds must survive an array of seed predators and pathogens and germinate under conditions favourable for seedling establishment. To maximise recruitment success plants protect seeds using a diverse set of chemical and physical defences. However, the relationship be...

Understanding the role of dispersal in determining population dynamics has been a cornerstone of the fields of population ecology and conservation biology since their inception. Plants have little control over the fate of their seeds, therefore secondary dispersal mechanisms are particularly important in determining plant community. We investigated...

• Context Functional–structural models (FSM) of tree growth have great potential in forestry, but their development, calibration and validation are hampered by the difficulty of collecting experimental data at organ scale for adult trees. Due to their simple architecture and morphological properties, “model plants” such as Cecropia sciadophylla ar...

Forest successional processes following disturbance take decades to play out, even in tropical forests. Nonetheless, records of vegetation change in this ecosystem are scarce, increasing the importance of the chronosequence approach to study forest recovery. However, this approach requires accurate dating of secondary forests, which until now was a...

Las parcelas permanentes de monitoreo de la vegetación (PPMV) posibilitan el estudio de la variación temporal de la estructura y composición del bosque y pueden ser utilizadas para una gran variedad de propósitos incluyendo mediciones del contenido y dinámica del carbono, estado de las poblaciones de especies con alto valor de conservación, cambios...

The recent opinion piece by Sheil and Padmanaba (201133. Sheil , D and Padmanaba , M. 2011. Innocent invaders? A preliminary assessment of Cecropia, an American tree, in Java. Plant Ecology & Diversity, 4: 231–240. View all references) argues that greater attention is required for invasive species management procedures that are relevant to and re...

Plant phenology is concerned with the timing of recurring biological events. Though phenology has traditionally been studied using intensive surveys of a local flora, results from such surveys are difficult to generalize to broader spatial scales. In this study, contrastingly, we assembled a continental-scale dataset of herbarium specimens for the...

In a recent study based on a retrospective reconstruction of growth, we showed for Cecropia sciadophylla that branching and flowering processes, as well as alternation of long and short nodes were regularly spaced by ~23 nodes. We also found that this strong periodicity was related to an annual cycle of growth. Adult trees are successful individual...

Although there is an increasing number of models simu-lating the functional and structural development of trees at organ scale, few of them can be fully calibrated, evaluated and validated. A major obstacle resides in the intrinsic complexity of trees due to their high stature, large number of organs and long life span that limits the possibilities...

Le genre Cecropia regroupe des arbres pionniers, à croissance rapide, qui colonisent les aires défrichées et les milieux ouverts à fort ensoleillement. Leur architecture est relativement simple et conforme au modèle de Rauh. Tout au long de la vie de la plante il est possible de retrouver a posteriori les cicatrices de feuille, d’inflorescences et...

The genus Cecropia includes pioneer trees that colonize canopy gaps and cleared areas. It is widely distributed from Mexico to Northern Argentina. Cecropia trees have architecture, which corresponds to the Rauh’s architectural model. In recent studies we have found that C. obtusa/ and C. sciadophylla, in French Guiana, have a strong annual periodic...

Cecropia species, ranging from Mexico to northern Argentina and the West Indies, are pioneer trees that colonize cleared areas with high light. To determine their ages to help pinpoint the date of the area's disturbance, we need to understand their developmental and architectural changes over time. The simple architecture of Cecropia conforms to th...