AMAP FOREST PLOT NETWORKS

AMAP FOREST PLOT NETWORKS

AMAP scientists in collaboration with local partners have over the last 35 years set up networks of permanent forest plots in French Guiana, Central Africa (Cameroon and Gabon) and New Caledonia. These networks include about 850 plots of 100 m² to 1 ha in size, on which more than 200,000 trees have been inventoried. During these inventories, forest trees are measured (in diameter, sometimes in height and in crown size), mapped and permanently labelled. Botanical identification is carried out either in the field (for the best known species) or in herbaria on the samples collected during the inventory. For French Guiana and New Caledonia networks, the accuracy of identifications is closely linked to the availability and quality of the herbarium platforms CAY and NOU. Complementary measurements are sometimes acquired on these plots, depending on the different projects (functional traits, terrestrial LiDAR scans, etc.).

The datasets resulting from these inventories are used for a wide range of research on tropical forests, such as systematics, biogeography, ecology or historical ecology, including at continental or even global scales, since all or part of these plots are integrated into large international networks. These researches resulted in 84 publications among which four in Science and two in Nature (see Publications section below).