Special Issue: Resilience of tropical dry forests to extreme disturbance events

Abstract

Extreme climatic and anthropogenic disturbance events are driving forces of regional and global forest change. This special issue is dedicated towards evaluating tropical dry forest resilience to such events in Mexico at the landscape, ecosystem, community and population levels. Collectively, the articles herein suggest that tropical dry forests are highly resilient to these extreme disturbances, at least in the short-term, because different patterns and processes across ecological levels can recover relatively quickly to pre-disturbance conditions. However, because forest recovery is strongly controlled by water availability, extreme dry years after disturbance may limit its resilience capacity. Understanding the precipitation regime in these seasonally dry forests will be crucial for improving their management as the frequency of extreme events increases. A common theme of several articles in this special issue is that resilience of tropical dry forests to the interacting effects of climatic and anthropogenic disturbances seems so far idiosyncratic and unpredictable and merits further research in the long-term.