This symposium will focus on the impacts of global environmental changes during the Anthropocene and their effects on community assemblage, species distribution and ecosystem functioning mediated by insects and their multiple interactions with host plants.

Hydroelectric dams have induced widespread loss, fragmentation and degradation of terrestrial habitats in lowland tropical and sub-tropical forests. In this symposium, we aim to synthetize the current knowledge on biodiversity responses to habitat loss and insular fragmentation induced by hydroelectric dams.

Variations in hydrological environments have been neglected in studies of tropical forest responses to climate change, despite ~50% of Amazonia having shallow water tables. We examine how water table depth filters plant composition and traits, affects forest dynamics and the resulting ecosystem behavior, with globally important consequences for drought responses.

Compare responses of different tropical forest ecosystems to large-scale nutrient additions with the aim of providing a framework of how nutrient availability shapes ecosystem processes, such as carbon and nutrient cycling, plant productivity, how it influences plant community assemblies and their functional traits and species co-existence.

This symposium on implicit bias in the tropical scientific community will highlight the untapped potential of improved inclusion and multidisciplinary cooperation for biodiversity conservation by presenting latest findings from conservation research and practice that will be discussed with respect to opportunities and challenges for conserving tropical biodiversity.

The symposium will explore how the distribution and abundance of tropical trees are influenced by the interactions with microbes and insect pests, and how plant traits can shape the nature and extent of pest pressure.

This symposium unites scientists using a broad range of ecophysiological approaches in a diverse group if selection of forests to further the understanding of how tropical forests will function in a changing world.

The symposium will visualize the research on the patterns and mechanisms of diversity and changes in the Tropical Andes forest, to obtain feedback and propose new perspectives. It will offer a broad range of approaches and will facilitate the creation of a network for regional research about this topic.

Showcasing an international collaborative effort to produce conservation assessments and practical conservation success for trees.

Identifying the functional proxies of the drivers of community assembly and dynamics is key to improve predictions of the future of tropical systems.

A synthesis and outlook of epiphyte research: all you wanted to know about vascular epiphytes and all we want to know to understand them more fully.

The resilience of Amazon forests to the increased occurrence of wildfires is a planetary priority to avert the climate crisis. This symposium will synthesize the most recent research on ecological, social, and political aspects of Amazonian fires, and discuss societal implications and possible solutions.

This symposium will create syntheses of novel ecological and climate change effects research in these ecosystems in different continents, and it will help establish a pantropical network of plots for forest monitoring in mountains, something which does not yet exist.

Climate drivers, natural disturbance, and anthropogenic influences on long-term (>20 year) patterns of plant reproduction in tropical forests have been studied using a common set of methodologies fostering important insights into our changing tropical forests.

This symposium will advance the integration of three key disciplines (empirical field ecology, remote sensing, and land surface modeling) with the goals of rapidly improving understanding of the structure, function and composition of tropical forests, and greatly improving predictions on the fate of these critical ecosystems.

This session synthesizes new research on the response of tropical forest trees to temperature with particular focus on new elevation gradient studies in tropical montane and lowland forests in Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Rwanda, and Australia and leaf thermoregulation studies.

This symposium will present case studies from multiple Neotropical biodiversity groups, showing how specimen datasets from museum and publication records can be used rapidly to estimate species extinction risk.

We present multi-disciplinary research on tropical silvopastoral systems (in Colombia, Brazil and Ethiopia) aiming to investigate the impacts of these systems from social, economic, biodiversity and sustainability perspectives, and to understand why implementation of this form of agriculture remains low so that solutions can be found to increase it.

Restoration efforts in the tropics often overlook the importance of belowground dynamics. However, studies have highlighted the key role of biota-root symbioses, such as mycorrhizae and symbiotic N-fixing bacteria, on tropical forest regeneration. This symposium aims to gather top researchers in the field to improve our understanding of tropical restoration.

This symposium explores emerging uses of remote sensing of forests across large scales, including biodiversity, carbon, repeated forest loss, forest intactness, infrastructure detection, and climate change impacts.

By reconciling theory with data and synthesis we increase our understanding and predictability of secondary forest succession and how it can be used as the natural engine for ecosystem restoration.

Conservation education is bringing together local communities, scientists and decision makers building learning communities in the tropics and the rest of the World, addressing challenges and finding opportunities in the socio political, economic, and ecological dimensions of the local context.

In this symposium we will explore how integrating current seed dispersal studies with theories of forest succession can help inform forest restoration and natural recovery.

This symposium presents research on the potential of land-use interventions to achieve peacebuilding and environmental conservation objectives in rural areas of Colombia emerging from conflict and experiencing deforestation. We study how SLUS contributes to Colombia's REDD+, NDCs and peacebuilding processes and explain how they can be tailored to specific contexts.

Opportunities and Challenges for Oak Conservation in the Tropics

Understanding soil biodiversity-dependent processes and ecosystem service provisioning is critical to promoting informed management of functional diversity to prevent tipping points from being crossed. We discuss schemes managing "functional diversity" at biophysical, economic, and societal scales, using southwestern Amazonia as a blueprint.

Large scale monitoring of biodiversity using eDNA-based methods can capture the high diversity associated with tropical habitats, and demonstrate potential environmental threats in terrestrial, riverine and marine systems.

This symposium unites scientists using a broad range of ecophysiological approaches to improve tropical forests management best-practices and restoration outcomes in a changing world.

Increasing habitat fragmentation caused by linear infrastructure is a major threat to arboreal wildlife across tropical forests. Artificial crossing structures can help mitigate the ecological impacts of fragmentation on wildlife populations and help reconnect the forest canopy. Here we share the lessons learned to scale up ACS implementation.

To ensure ecosystem restoration delivers resilient landscapes that benefit biodiversity, ecosystem services and people’s wellbeing, the effect of meeting restoration targets needs to be well understood from both ecological and socio-economic viewpoints. We bring together scientists using diverse research approaches to tackle these difficult questions in the Colombian context.

This symposium aims to synthesize recent research on the evolutionary drivers of biological diversity in the Andean-Amazon region.

With examples from the Rupununi region in Guyana, we provide lessons learnt to strengthen community engagement through fostered collaboration, social learning, trust-building, and the formation of social networks of communities, researchers, and decision-makers.

We investigate the links between wildmeat and human health, with a particular lens on the impacts of COVID-19 on the use and trade of wildmeat.

This symposium presents new evidence using spatial and policy analysis to address the ongoing governance challenges of forest and biodiversity conservation in the Colombian post-conflict period.

This symposium will bring together the latest research on active and passive remote sensing for the measuring and mapping of plant functional traits, ecosystem structure and function across tropical forests around the world.

Tropical biodiversity is difficult to survey at large spatial scales, and regional-scale patterns of tropical biodiversity change are poorly known. This symposium surveys contemporary progress in understanding regional-scale tropical biodiversity change and searches for general patterns that permit qualitative up-scaling of local studies.

Under the current scenarios of landscape transformation, communal territory management systems in the Andes show panoramas of threats and resilience; both of them have to be considered, in order to achieve strategies of coexistence of sustainable development of the original Andean societies with the conservation of the local/regional biodiversity.

This symposium will follow up with pre-and-post forest recovery, implications of novel restoration methods, and their outcomes to guide future research and provide insight into biodiversity conservation resilience.

Caribbean Botanical Gardens comprise important institutions for research and are an unparalleled resource in conserving the regions highly endemic flora.

Arboreal camera trapping has enormous potential to reveal the canopy’s mysteries, from kinkajou feeding ecology, to orchids pollination ecology and botanical phenology. This session provides a glimpse into the many questions this method can answer, while providing methodological guidance for interested researchers.

Avian migration systems in South America are poorly known, particularly intra-tropical migration and seasonal movements.  Many details still need to be uncovered to aid in conservation strategies in a quickly-industrializing region.  Here we attempt to synthesize current knowledge, assess emerging patterns, and plan for priority research in the future.

This session presents research into the distribution of South American peatlands, the influence of disturbance on peatland functioning and highlights knowledge gaps where further research is needed.