Identifying drivers of forest resilience in long-term records from the Neotropics

Here we use 30 long-term, high-resolution palaeoecological records from Mexico, Central and South America to address two hypotheses regarding possible drivers of resilience in tropical forests as measured in terms of recovery rates from previous disturbances. First, we hypothesise that faster recovery rates are associated with regions of higher biodiversity, as suggested by the insurance hypothesis. And second, that resilience is due to intrinsic abiotic factors that are location specific, thus regions presently displaying resilience in terms of persistence to current climatic disturbances should also show higher recovery rates in the past. To test these hypotheses, we applied a threshold approach to identify past disturbances to forests within each sequence. We then compared the recovery rates to these events with pollen richness before the event. We also compared recovery rates of each site with a measure of present resilience in the region as demonstrated by measuring global vegetati...