Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Lowland High Rainforest: Structure and Tree Species Diversity

2001; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-94-015-9821-7_4

2215-1729

Odile Poncy, Daniel Sabatier, Marie-Françoise Prévost, Isabelle Hardy,

Agriculture and Rural Development Research

Diversity studies provide data useful to the basic knowledge of biodiversity as well as a baseline for many other research fields. Forest dynamics, descriptive and functional ecology, conservation and sustainable development projects, need such data that are still few for neotropical forests, and especially so for French Guiana. Data from previous studies in this region come from 'Piste de Saint-Elie' (Sabatier & Prévost 1990b, Prévost & Sabatier 1996) and Saül (Oldeman 1974, Mori & Boom 1987). The research program at Nouragues aims to study forest dynamics and natural regeneration processes in the forest, including seed dispersal by vertebrates. The establishment of the station as a permanent research site has provided opportunity as well as appropriate conditions to undertake such studies, and to add one more piece to the jigsaw (Milliken 1998). The first surveys of floristic and tree diversity at Nouragues were based on preliminary results from 1989 (Sabatier & Prévost 1990a) and 1995 (Poncy et al. 1998).