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Abstract

Tropical forests have enormous ecological and societal significance. They are home to exceptional biological diversity (including humans), they profoundly affect a suite of globalscale processes, and unfortunately, they are experiencing myriad effects of global environmental change. Yet, our understanding of basic ecosystem processes such as nutrient limitation in the tropics lags far behind many temperate and high latitude ecosystems, and those data that do exist have not been thoroughly synthesized. In many respects, this deficit results from a scarcity of data, but more from the fact that the tropical rain forest biome is extraordinarily complex. Tropical forests present many unique challenges to resolving questions about nutrient limitation, including the potential for limitation by multiple elements across both small and large spatial scales. Despite these challenges, all confirmed participants of our proposed NCEAS workshop believe that we are now at the point where a productive synthesis of data describing tropical nutrient cycling and limitation can and should be undertaken, and that this endeavor has the potential to generate a suite of valuable products that will be of broad utility to ecologists, biogeochemists and to society as a whole.