From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.
As 2020 came to a close, the Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) marked three decades as a global research network with a landmark new paper published in Biological Conservation (253: 108907; 2021), “ForestGEO: Understanding forest diversity and dynamics through a global observatory network.” The article describes the network’s history, methodology, contributions to forest science, future directions, and need for ongoing financial support.
What began as a single plot with a powerful new methodology grew into a global network collaborating to examine the drivers of forest dynamics. Every five years ForestGEO field crews at all 71 research sites map, measure, tag with a number, and identify to species every stem with a diameter at breast height or DBH (the standard for measuring trees) equal to or greater than 1 cm in plots that are typically between 15 and 50 hectares. In addition to contextualizing the growth and evolution of the network, the new paper authored by Stuart Davies and an international team of 156 co-authors synthesizes key metrics from each plot in a data-dense table that identifies each site’s area, first census year, tree count, species count, Fisher’s alpha, census count, elevation, mean annual temperature, and mean annual precipitation. This table highlights the diversity of the ForestGEO plots, and it offers a platform from which to consider future cross-site analyses.