Researcher receives grant to study and restore tropical rainforest ecology

J. Leighton Reid and his team have an opportunity to research the most efficient and cost-effective means of restoring a tropical rainforest in Ecuador. 

Reid, assistant professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, received a $600,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award to research the back-and-forth relationship between vegetation and animals in the Chocó Biogeographical Region. 

“Those initial species of plants that establish in the landscape are influencing the types of animals that come, which is influencing the type of seeds that arrive, and that’s going to be the best predictor of what the ultimate tree community is going to be,” said Reid, who recently led a team that received a Destination Area 2.0 grant, awarded for transdisciplinary research teams who are focused on solving complex global problems.

As a part of the five-year project, he will also create a two-year program for undergraduate students who will assist in monitoring the site and tracking animals.

“The decisions made now about how and where to restore the environment will have profound impacts on climate stability, biodiversity persistence, and social equity for generations,” said Reid, a faculty affiliate of the Global Change Center. “Ecologically, these impacts will be determined by the outcomes of community assembly, which I propose are tightly linked to the composition, diversity, and spatial structure of trees planted by land managers.”

Healthy rainforests are vital in the fight against global warming. They absorb carbon in the atmosphere to help maintain a cooler planet and are home to the world’s most diverse assemblages of plants and animals. 

One such region is the Chocó rainforest, a biodiversity hotspot and home to 62 bird species found nowhere else in the world, according to Reid, a faculty affiliate of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. He said that 96 percent of the lowland rain forest in Ecuador has been deforested for agriculture. 

Head of the Restoration Ecology Working Group, Reid has been collaborating since 2021 with the international scientists affiliated with the Fundación para la Conservación de los Andes Tropicales (FCAT), a community-based nongovernmental organization composed of local residents and scientists. The group has been purchasing deforested land in the Chocó biographical region from private landowners and now has 1,546 acres toward a goal of building a corridor from the rainforest to the wetlands of Laguna de Cube.

For this research, Reid designed 12 experimental ecological restoration sites that are within the Chocó region. These sites cover 65 acres and provide the unique ability to study the most efficient and cost-effective means of restoring the ecology of a rainforest on a much bigger scale than is often possible. 

“We planted small patches of trees using a restoration design that’s called applied nucleation, the idea that you can mimic the natural spatial pattern of ecological succession by planting small patches of vegetation instead of entire large-scale tree plantations and get the same response in terms of biodiversity recovery,” Reid said. 

The CAREER award-funded project will study how the plants’ fruits attract animal species that disperse the seeds as they move from existing rainforest to the degraded sites. According to Reid, birds, bats, and other mammals are among the most important seed-dispersers, affecting the dispersal of more than 80 percent of rainforest trees.

The accompanying program for undergraduate students will be called TROPICALS, which stands for Tropical Research Opportunities in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and is modeled after a program at Tulane University.

“Reid’s exceptional track record as a restoration ecologist is helping elevate Virginia Tech’s stature as a leader in the field, which comes at a time when restoring ecosystems across the world has become a formal national priority through initiatives like the America the Beautiful Challenge,” said William Hopkins, director of the Global Change Center. “His CAREER award includes a strong vision for training the next generation of leaders through experiential learning in the tropics provides hope that ecosystems critical to biodiversity and our own well-being can be restored and protected for generations to come.”

Throughout the five years of the research project, Reid and his students will monitor the site and track which animals are visiting it and which plants are arriving with mounted cameras placed in the research plots. Undergraduate students will learn tropical ecology and conservation, agroecology, environmental justice and landscape conservation, and biodiversity of the tropics.