The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation is one of the hottest conferences of the year, bringing together ecologists and biologists from all over the world to present research and discuss salient issues affecting the tropics. This year’s conference was held in July in Cartagena, Colombia with a focus on Conserving Tropical Biodiversity and Achieving Socio-Ecological Resilience in the Anthropocene: Opportunities and Challenges. Forest-centric faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students of the Comita, Queenborough, and Harris labs well represented the School.  

Professor of Tropical Forest Ecology Liza Comita, a world renown expert on the ecological mechanisms driving patterns of diversity, dynamics, and species distributions in both pristine and human-altered tropical forests, gave a plenary talk on “Janzen-Connell beyond 50: Tropical plant-enemy interactions in a changing world.” In 2015, the National Science Foundation awarded Comita their NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for her research on diversity in tropical forests.  

Senior Lecturer and Research Scientist Simon Queenborough, Lecturer and Associate Research Scientist Marlyse Duguid, Comita, postdoc Michelle Spicer, and doctoral student Hari Venugopalan Nair Radhamoni organized a lunchtime workshop, “Diversity and dynamics of the herbaceous plant communities in forest ecosystems.” This group of YSE researchers created this workshop to increase understanding of diversity and identifying key knowledge gaps, which Comita noted is “a precursor to a multi-day NSF-funded workshop we will be hosting next year,” further demonstrating Comita’s commitment to building upon science year after year.     

Cullman Post-doctoral Research Associate Sergio Villegas Estrada co-organized the symposium, “Integrating seed dispersal and forest restoration; from animal movement to species interactions,” and spoke on how understanding forest succession and seed dispersal “can help inform forest restoration and natural recovery.”  

Many other members of our community participated in the ATBC program as well. Queenborough gave a talk on herbaceous plants from Yasuni, Ecuador.  

NSF Postdoctoral Fellow Michelle Spicer spoke on epiphytes and YIBS Hutchinson Postdoctoral Fellow Jason Vleminckx presented on climate change and fruit production. Comita Lab PhD students Radhamoni gave a talk on herbaceous plant diversity across a rainfall gradient in southern India, and Akshay Surendra presented a poster on plant-soil feedbacks and tree species coexistence in dipterocarp forests in Sri Lanka. Harris Lab doctoral student Siria Gámez presented on her research “Cats, cattle, and conflict: using agent-based modeling to understand how pastoral management affects jaguar-cattle predation.” 

With such a strong showing, YSE researchers shined at this year’s ATBC and undoubtedly will do so next year.