U.S.-Mexico Collaborative Studies on Determinants of Distribution in Piper Species from a Tropical Rain Forest

该奖项将支持克里斯托弗B教授。卡内基领域 华盛顿研究所和罗伯特W.皮尔斯的 加州大学戴维斯分校与 国立大学的卡洛斯·瓦斯奎兹-亚内斯教授 墨西哥自治区。 研究人员打算进行 实验的两个重要但知之甚少的方面， 热带雨林植物的生态学在植物属胡椒，生长在 墨西哥韦拉克鲁斯州的“图斯特拉斯”生物保护区。 的 实验是利用Piper物种进行多物种比较 原产于光照条件截然不同的栖息地。 一组 实验侧重于植物的生理生态学， 幼苗阶段，一个以高死亡率为特征的阶段，但 对此知之甚少。 在不到几个月大的植物上 身高不到10厘米，他们打算研究功能性 增长率的决定因素，包括生物量分配、矿物 营养、光合作用和组织构建成本。 的 另一组实验探索光合作用和蒸腾作用 在波动的光线中。 利用效率的变化 已知波动光对以下具有重要影响： 几种物种的碳平衡。 利用波动 光还没有被研究在一个系统中，其他功能 生长的决定因素和胡椒属一样被充分理解。 拟议的研究将继续开发Piper属， 一个模型系统，用于理解控制 热带雨林植物的分布。 大部分 合作的基础设施已经建立， 长期的正式和非正式互动的结果， 这两个国家的首席研究员。 强调A 广泛研究的模型系统应该产生高回报，因为许多 生态学中的问题只有通过整合 关于生物体多方面的信息 生物学

This award will support Professor Christopher B. Field of Carnegie Institute of Washington and Professor Robert W. Pearcy of the University of California at Davis in a research collaboration with Professor Carlos Vasquez-Yanes of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). The researchers intend to carry out experiments on 2 important but poorly understood aspects of the ecology of rainforest plants in the plant genus Piper, growing in the "Los Tuxtlas" biological preserve, in Veracruz, Mexico. The experiments are multi-species comparisons utilizing Piper species native to habitats of contrasting light availability. One group of experiments focuses on the physiological ecology of plants at the young seedling stage, a stage characterized by high mortality, but about which little is known. On plants less than a few months old and less than 10 cm tall, they intend to study the functional determinants of growth rate, including biomass allocation, mineral nutrition, photosynthesis, and tissue construction costs. The other group of experiments explores photosynthesis and transpiration in fluctuating light. Variation in the efficiency of utilizing fluctuating light is known to have important consequences for carbon balance for several species. The utilization of fluctuating light has not been studied in a system where other functional determinants of growth are as well understood as in the genus Piper. The proposed research will continue to develop the genus Piper as a model system for understanding the mechanisms controlling the distributions of tropical rainforest plants. Much of the infrastructure for the collaboration is already established, as a result of long-standing formal and informal interactions among the principal investigators in both countries. The emphasis on a widely studied model system should yield high returns because many questions in ecology can be answered only through the integration of information concerning multiple aspects of an organism's biology.