BioEnv seminar: “Resistance, Response, and Recovery: Forest Resilience in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria”

Short abstract
Anthropogenic climate change is altering disturbance regimes, creating novel pressures on forest recovery processes. In the Caribbean, shorter return intervals for high-intensity hurricanes may fundamentally alter tropical forest demographic responses. One key but understudied process shaping post-hurricane recovery is delayed mortality, in which trees die years after an initial disturbance event. Puerto Rican forests provide a powerful system for examining these dynamics because they have experienced repeated hurricane disturbance, including Hurricane Maria (2017), an unusually severe storm that may reflect future disturbance conditions. In this talk, I use long-term forest census data to quantify mechanisms of delayed mortality, assess how storm severity influences mortality risk, and discuss implications of delayed mortality for post-hurricane forest recovery and resilience under changing disturbance regimes.