Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests

Martinez-Yrizar, A. (1995). Biomass distribution and primary productivity of tropical dry forests. In "Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests (S. H. Bullock, H. A. Mooney, and E. Medina, Ed.), pp. 326-345. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 

Seasonally dry tropical forests generally occur on fertile soils with a moderate to high pH and nutrient status and low levels of aluminium. Such soils are very suitable for agriculture (Ratter et al., 1978), which has resulted in enormous forest deshuction in many areas (e.g. less than 2% of seasonally dry forests on the Padlic coast of Mesoamerica are still intact Janzen, 1988), a problem exacerbated by the large human populations in many neotropical dry forest life zones (Murphy and Lugo, 1995). 

Other vegetation types occur within the Cerrado Biome. Gallery forests occur along the rivers, and contain many species which also occur in the rain forests of the Amazon and the Atlantic coast of Brazil (Oliveira-Filho and Ratter, 1995). Wet campos, lacking trees, except the fan palm Mauritia flexuosa L.f., frequently occur between cerrados and gallery forest, where there is extreme fluctuation of the water table. In these areas, waterlogging in the wet season excludes woody cerrado species, while in the dry season the soils are too dry to support gallery forest species. Seasonally dry tropical forest occurs on areas of fertile soil, which are often associated with calcareous rocks (Ratter et al., 1978). 

Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests Conserving Fragments OF Fragments... 

Gentry, A.H., Diversity and floristic composition of neotropical dry forests, in Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests, Bullock, S.H., Mooney, H.A. and Medina, E., Eds, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995,146. 

Linares-Palomino, R., Pennington, R.T., and Bridgewater, S., The phytogeography of seasonally dry tropical forests in Equatorial Pacific South America, Candollea, 58, 473, 2003. 

Trejo, 1. and Dirzo, R., Eloristic diversity of Mexican seasonally dry tropical forests, Biodiv. Cons., 11,2063,2002. Weberbaner, A., El mundo vegetal de los Andes Peruanos, Estac. Exper. Agric. La Molina, Edit. Lume, Lima, 1945. 

FIGURE 7.8 Mean cumulative number of species in areas of rain forests and seasonally dry tropical forests of eastern South America with increasing number of areas. 

It is interesting that most species in these families that show a disjunct distribution, conforming loosely to the Pleistocenic arc, are essentially cerrado species rather than species of seasonally dry tropical forests. It is also in species such as Justicia aequilabris or genera such as Hemipogon where the best evidence for ongoing evolution of species can be discerned. However, until phylogenetic... 

Phytogeography and Floristics of Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests in Peru... 

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