PATTERN AND PROCESS IN NEOTROPICAL SECONDARY RAIN-FORESTS - THE FIRST100 YEARS OF SUCCESSION

More and more areas of deforested wet tropical lands are being handed back to nature as their erstwhile owners abandon attempts to farm them . The resulting secondary successions offer hope that some of the uniq ue characteristics of the original rain forests may be recovered and c onserved. However, most of our understanding of what secondary tropica l rain forests are and how and why they develop is limited to the firs t decade of a process that may last for centuries. A longer-term view indicates that the causes of change in neotropical secondary successio ns are similar to those operating in temperate forests, but yields sob ering conclusions for conservation.