A3: Identifying Spatial Patterns of Tropical Rain Forest in Sri Lanka

PhD student: Ruwan Punchi Manage
Thesis Committee: Prof. Kerstin Wiegand, Prof. Joachim Saborowski, Prof. Martin Schlather
Graduation Date: 9/2014

The Center for Tropical Forest Sciences (CTFS) organizes a long term monitoring program of 25-50 ha fully mapped forest dynamic plots across the world to better understand forest dynamics, ecosystem maintenance and global climatic change; Sinharaja (Sri Lanka) harbors one such plot. Many years of extensive fieldwork at this site have yielded a large amount of data, such as species distribution, DBH distribution, type of the species etc. which can now be analyzed.
The overall aim of my project is to examine the hidden information of tropical rain forest species distribution patterns and their bivariate and multivariate species interaction by point process modeling and spatial analysis to infer key processes of forest dynamics and maintenance of diversity.


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