Revegetation of landslides, vegetation > 1.0m (Large landslide plots at the Luquillo Experimental Forest)

Here we use permanent plot data sampled from 16 landslide to documents temporal successional pathways in landslide patches (without the use of a chronosequence, cf. Guariguata 1990) and address the following questions: (1) What are the successional pathways of landslide and what species define them? How much pathway variation of individual plots is there within these landslides? (2) How similar are pathways among landslide? Is there any evidence that, with time, landslides either converge to a common vegetative enpoint or slow in the rate of successional change? The purpose of this study is to document the recovery of vegetation on new landslides in the Luquillo Experimental Forest. Support for this work was provided by grants BSR-8811902, DEB-9411973, DEB-9705814 , DEB-0080538, DEB-0218039 , DEB-0620910 , DEB-1239764, DEB-1546686, and DEB-1831952 from the National Science Foundation to the University of Puerto Rico as part of the Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Program. Additional support provided by the University of Puerto Rico and the International Institute of Tropical Forestry, USDA Forest Service.