Home (in Japanese) „

Life history strategies of tropical plants and their contribution to promotion and maintenance of biodiversity: interactions between organisms with resource, information and service exchange

OrganizersF Nakasizuka, T. Momose, K.

Goal of the symposium:

Numerous studies have been made on life history strategies characteristic of tropical plants. Interactions among organisms have great influences on life history strategies. Such interactions are closely related with some circumstances that are characteristically found in tropical rainforests: 1. Strong solar radiation results in rich surplus of carbohydrates; 2. Seasonality is absent and environmental fluctuations with unpredictable super-annual intervals are predominant; and 3. In swamps, local unbalance between slow decomposition and rapid production is often observed. There are several possibilities to explain biodiversity of tropical rainforests from these aforementioned circumstances. A distinctive feature of this symposium is that we are trying to measure the materialistic basis of interactions by studying the processes of production, storage, allocation, and circulation in order to evaluate the contribution of interactions to coexistence or diversification of tropical plants. With this vision, the goal of this symposium is to seek the perspectives connecting various studies with different methodologies including ones on material allocations by methods of measurements, ones of interactions by methods of observations and field experiments, and ones to trace diversification by methods of phylogenetic analyses.

Program: