Day 2 Summary

4th November 2021

Day two of #TropiCon21 has come to a close and we want to thank everyone who continues to make this conference a success! Today we have seen presentations from 11 new speakers as well as a fantastic plenary talk.

Across these first two days of the conference, 201 of you have got actively involved with sharing, liking, and asking questions at the presentations, reaching up to 404 000 people in the audience! At the end of day two, there have been over a thousand tweets on the Tropicon21 hashtag!

We started day two with a talk from Alejandro de la Fuente on variations in species abundance at a high spatial resolution in the Australian Wet Tropics.

Next, we heard from Daniela Requena Suarez, who discussed the effects of disturbance on aboveground biomass, species richness, and recovery towards undisturbed levels in Peru’s Amazonian forests.

Lily Unger then told us about her work using sediment cores to reconstruct the past ecology of Madagascan lakes. Her story started with a very rare duck!

Thiago Silva presented a review of the multiple spatial and temporal scales through which hydrology shapes the biota of the Amazon floodplains.Their own work will soon start to incorporate LiDAR to better understand tree survival strategies.

Our day two plenary came from Conservation Optimism, giving us a positive communication toolkit for framing our research. Their toolkit is available for download in English, Spanish, and Bahasa Indonesia.

After our plenary, we heard from Tamali Mondal who told us about their work with ecological niche modelling of invasive plant species.

Julie Teresa Shapiro presented their research using acoustic monitoring to record bat activity in an African savanna.

Next, Jorge A. Giraldo shared with us their research on the growth rhythms of trees in ever-wet tropical rainforest.

After a short break, Kerstin Pierick gave a presentation about their research on fine root functional traits in tropical forests.

Then Toby Jackson told us about their research using LiDAR to map canopy disturbance in tropical forests.

Emma Duley explained how they are using the Eden Project as a model site for eDNA metabarcoding of plant communities.

Our final talk of the day was from Daniel Augusto de Silva, who gave us new insights to the variation of canopy leaf area index in a Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Thank you again to everyone who has presented, questioned, and shared the presentations so far at TropiCon21. We’ll be back tomorrow for more exciting talks and our closing ceremony, where we’ll be meeting with our plenary speakers on Zoom to discuss some of the big questions in spatial and temporal scales!