This symposium will showcase pantropical and regional studies of tree mortality, explore the environmental processes driving these variations in tropical forests, and highlight the importance of network collaborations and the approaches to conducting collaborative science across large international groups.

Vascular epiphytes are conspicuous components of tropical ecosystems, they fulfil important ecological functions and amplify biodiversity. The presentation of recent progress in our understanding of the ecology of vascular epiphytes will be the starting point for a discussion of implementing science-based conservation efforts.

This symposium convenes speakers to discuss the pioneering aspects of in situ drought experiments and to explore how these ecosystem scale studies contribute to novel understandings of drought effects on rainforest ecosystems.

Climbing trees to obtain canopy data can yield valuable insights, but safety risks can also be high. In this symposium, speakers will share their research results obtained with camera traps in the canopy, and they will give us their opinions about the pros and cons of this study approach.

A showcase of diverse proxies of past and present environments to explore the complex interplay between past human activities and the evolution of tropical landscapes, offering critical insights into long-term tropical forest dynamics.

The milpa is a Mesoamerican agroecosystem, typically conformed by maize, beans, squash and other species. It potentially entails many contributions to people including biodiversity conservation and food security and sovereignty. We synthesise and discuss the ecological knowledge available for milpas, identifying avenues for transdisciplinary research and guidelines for decision makers.

This symposium presents studies on pollination ecology in tropical ecosystems, exploring opportunities to address challenges from anthropogenic pressures. It features different approaches to understand the vulnerability and resilience of plant-pollinator interactions, highlighting the importance of community-driven projects and research collaborations to preserve pollination services and enhance ecosystem resilience.

This symposium examines biodiversity responses to human disturbances in tropical ecosystems, emphasizing resilience and recovery opportunities. By integrating innovative research with actionable conservation strategies, it aims to inform policy, support practitioners, and encourage interdisciplinary dialogue. The session fosters new approaches for sustainable ecosystem management and advances tropical biodiversity conservation efforts.

Through their rhythms and flows, rivers connect cultures, biodiversity and geographies through space and time. This session explores the concept of social-ecological connectivity, highlighting how rivers sustain and shape different relationships. The session also explores strategies for understanding, preserving, and restoring the connectivity and governance of tropical riverscapes.

This symposium will address the challenges and strategies for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services in tropical mountainous environments, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and local knowledge to enhance resilience and sustainability in the Anthropocene.

This symposium explores the Maya milpa as a socioecological system, highlighting its role in sustaining biodiversity, providing ecosystem services, and preserving cultural traditions, while examining its adaptability to global challenges and its potential to inspire innovative, integrative approaches to tropical conservation and sustainable development.

This session seeks to explore how biota respond to fire and flooding in tropical wetlands prone to fires while also examining traditional knowledge, as well as the climatic, economic, socio-ecological, and management dimensions of these unique ecosystems.

Oaks (Quercus spp.) play a vital ecological role due to their biomass, diversity, and functions. With Mesoamerica as a diversity hotspot, the symposium will showcase recent research on oak evolution and ecology, highlighting ongoing collaboration focus on their conservation. 

We assemble a diverse group of ecologists and botanists who are studying local liana communities around the world using a variety of approaches to understand long-term species-specific patterns of liana demography, drivers of increasing liana abundance and biomass, functional characteristics shared by increasing species, and potential ramifications of liana increases.

This symposium explores how acoustic studies can enhance our understanding of urbanization’s impacts on tropical biodiversity and inform innovative conservation strategies, bridging the gap between science and policy in rapidly urbanizing tropical regions.

This symposium will explore the challenges and strategies for conserving urban biodiversity in tropical landscapes, integrating multitaxonomic and social perspectives, with Brazil as a model for understanding the dynamics and functioning of tropical cities.

We anticipate that the event will identify key aspects for encouraging biodiversity leaders to actively engage the local community in conservation efforts. This symposium at ATBC 2025 will leverage expert opinions from across continents.

This symposium examines how throughfall manipulation experiments have advanced fundamental knowledge of the impacts of extreme drought on tropical ecosystem biodiversity and functioning, while providing critical insights on developing practical climate-adapted strategies for mitigating drought effects on tropical ecosystems.

This symposium will bring together diverse scientists to understand the drivers of change in savanna ecosystems and to build a critical body of knowledge for effective savanna conservation, management, restoration, and utilization. 

This symposium will explore how trade-offs in response to increasing temperature and drought stress (encompassing both atmospheric and soil drought) affect tropical forest resilience to climate change.

Biodiversity conservation is the best vaccine against the emergence of zoonoses

The symposium explores the role of biodiversity monitoring in establishing a credible biodiversity credit market, focusing on robust methodologies, technological integration, and metrics tailored for tropical ecosystems to ensure effective conservation funding and avoid pitfalls seen in voluntary carbon markets.

Bringing together researchers and practitioners, this symposium highlights the role of seed science in understanding and conserving Neotropical biodiversity, with two sessions on: (1) New Findings in Seed Ecophysiology in the Neotropics, and (2) Science-Based Seed Conservation.

This symposium will synthetize trait-based approaches to understanding the role of seedlings in tropical forest responses to global change.

Pseudosands are widely spread water-stable aggregates, which are neither pure sands, nor the plain sum of their clay- and silt-sized units, and need more attention when tackling our process understanding of tropical biogeochemical processes to support management and conservation strategies.

This session unites experts to reinvigorate tropical soil science, addressing methodological limitations and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to develop a roadmap for understanding and managing tropical soils over the next decade.

The way in which vertebrate animals influence soil nutrient composition through inputs of organic matter is a crucial but vastly understudied area of knowledge; symposium participants will highlight what is known about this dynamic and work with the audience to map out a future research agenda. 

Neotropical mountains provide resources and services to millions of people but are also highly vulnerable to climate change and land-use change. In this symposium, we present studies using experimental and observational approaches to further understand the effects of environmental change at a biodiversity level and at an ecosystem level.

The symposium "From Roots to Canopies" explores the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of plant growth habit transitions, integrating insights across biological scales, plant lineages, and disciplines to address key questions about anatomy, biomechanics, development, ecology, and macroevolution.

The symposium will involve a diverse range of actors, including conservation professionals, researchers, communicators, policy makers, NGOs, and community leaders. These actors will collaborate to explore effective communication strategies, integrating scientific insights with emotional engagement to enhance conservation messaging and foster a deeper connection with nature.

Finding ways to understand the evolutionary origins and ensure the effective management of Mesoamerican biodiversity must be a priority for international conservation.

This symposium aims to explore the complex interplay between small-scale disturbances, traditional ecological knowledge and biodiversity, emphasizing the need for nuanced conservation strategies that balance human needs with ecosystem health.

This symposium will showcase applied research on the conditions that enable the sustainable use and management of plant based-products within a range of natural and agricultural systems as a solution to halt transformation of natural ecosystems, conserve traditional knowledge and strengthen local governance.

Community-based biodiversity monitoring should ensure the participation and collaboration of diverse actors in the production of key information to support decision-making at different scales. Working in networks guarantees innovative solutions for diverse interests, especially of communities that inhabit ecologically strategic territories, while also promoting the sustainability of long-term monitoring processes.

The Brazilian Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna, is facing severe threats, with 50% of its vegetation converted to agriculture and rising deforestation rates. To address these challenges, this panel welcomes contributions to inclusive solutions for conservation, restoration, and sustainable land use in open ecosystems, with emphasis on the Cerrado.

This symposium explores how a collaborative research network merges local knowledge and global science to advance tropical ecosystem conservation, featuring case studies and strategies for integrating diverse approaches, disciplines, and actors.

This symposium reviews how technological innovations – including landscape models, bioacoustics, biologgers, and metabarcoding – can overcome the uniquely challenging complexity of tropical ecosystems and help to reveal how environmental change is shaping animal diversity and associated ecological functions.

This symposium explores interdisciplinary approaches to studying human-wildlife interactions related to crop-raiding, emphasizing collaboration among scientists, practitioners, and communities to integrate ecological, social, and traditional knowledge for safeguarding livelihoods, conserving biodiversity, and understanding the complex drivers of interactions.

This symposium focuses on dynamic tropical areas where forests, woodlands and agricultural lands meet, and links the landscape-transforming strategies of the various actors in those areas with landscape change and resulting ecosystem services, and wellbeing of local people. 

This session explores the long-term ecological research on tropical forests across six Brazilian biomes, addressing research gaps and promoting collaboration to build unified understanding of climate change impacts on forest ecosystems.

This symposium will showcase how integration of long-term and landscape-scale transdisciplinary research is helping unravel the multiple levels of resilience or vulnerability of a tropical forest ecosystem to climate changes.

We discuss the effects of infrastructure and public policy on conservation, landscape configuration and local land use in the Yucatan Region. The session aims to discuss how governance and territorial change are linked, and how conservation practices (e.g carbon trade, payment for ecosystem services) are shifting under current infrasructure programs.

This session will focus on the urgent need for innovative financial mechanisms, interdisciplinary collaboration, and inclusive conservation strategies to address the ecological, economic, and social challenges posed by biodiversity loss in tropical ecosystems, with particular emphasis on the transformative potential of nature finance schemes for conservation of tropical ecosystems.

This symposium will present a comprehensive synthesis of ongoing research efforts and scientific priorities aimed at addressing knowledge gaps across disciplines and spatial scales with the ultimate goal of advancing our understanding of fire ecology and conservation in the Cerrado, the most biodiverse and expansive savanna in the Americas.

This symposium will present a broad range of innovative approaches that integrate field measurements, remote sensing, modeling, and data synthesis, to quantify the vulnerability and resilience of tropical moist forests to climate extremes, deforestation, and forest degradation, and the risk of tropical forests becoming net carbon sources.

This symposium addresses the drivers and mechanisms of secondary forest succession, and its consequences for restoration

This session will explore how intensifying Amazonian droughts disrupt plant function, increase fire risk, and drive ecosystem degradation, convening experts to assess the cascading effects of warming and drought on forest resilience, vulnerability, and long-term stability across scales.
 

This symposium will explore how innovative AI applications empower ecology and conservation by democratizing access to advanced technologies, enabling stakeholders to utilize local knowledge, and enhancing equity in tropical research to address pressing biodiversity and conservation challenges.

The symposium will address the impacts of invasive species on African tropical grasslands and explore innovative conservation solutions. By merging scientific research with local knowledge, we aim to develop effective management strategies that safeguard biodiversity, ecosystem health, and livelihoods, fostering collaboration for meaningful outcomes during ATBC 2025

Selective logging is commonly used in the tropics for timber extraction, which can lead to forest degradation. The symposium addresses the effect of selective logging on forest dynamics and biodiversity, and explores drivers of forest recovery after logging. Studies cover different tropical regions, and management recommendations will be discussed.

This symposium explores how advanced remote sensing technologies, from drones to satellites, can quantify biodiversity, analyse ecological interactions, and monitor the effects of climate change, integrating machine learning and AI for large-scale biodiversity assessments.

A celebration of the amazing diversity and unique ecology of the ever-wet tropical regions, including northwestern Amazonia, and an exploration of future research avenues.

How can we leverage decades of forest ecology research to inform effective monitoring of tropical forest restoration projects?

With the increasing likelihood of global warming and, consequently, environmental disasters in the next decades, Amazonia needs to implement evidence-based transboundary policies in the short term to avoid the collapse of socioecological systems. Among these, law enforcement, economic opportunities, and land use planning are at the forefront of short-term solutions.

This symposium focuses on innovative methods and approaches in landscape ecology aimed at conserving, restoring, and managing disturbed and fragmented tropical ecosystems. The talks will encourage practical strategies and foster interdisciplinary dialogue to strengthen the resilience of neotropical landscapes against deforestation and climate change.

This symposium explores the ecological and cultural importance of wild bees, focusing on their microbiomes, conservation challenges, and role as umbrella species, while highlighting interdisciplinary strategies to address biodiversity loss and climate-driven perturbations in tropical ecosystems.

We aim to emphasize the effects that tropical root-symbionts have on whole ecosystem processes including nutrient cycles and forest growth, and bridge conceptual and collaborative links between mycorrhizal and nitrogen-fixing symbiont research, to improve understanding of tropical forest function and resilience.

Ants are integral to the ecology and diversity of tropical ecosystems. Agroforestry management impacts their ecology, biodiversity, and associated ecosystem services, which can benefit crop production. This symposium aims to explore these themes across various tropical agroforestry systems, geographic regions, and research approaches, to promote both conservation and sustainable agriculture.

Geographic structure in taxonomic distribution, trait distribution and evolutionary patterns have been shown by both ecological and phylogenetic studies, and we explore and aim to synthesize the emerging phylogenetic patterns in trait evolution across a diverse set of organisms from the tropics.

International Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platforms are regarded as providers of best evidence to guide the implementation of policies for conservation and sustainability worldwide. This symposium aims at tackling the challenges and opportunities of these international efforts for conservation in the tropics and their relevance for tropical biology and cultural diversity conservation.

The ecology of insular ecosystems

Tropical biodiversity increasingly inhabits human-modified landscapes, facing multiple threats that accelerate its decline. This symposium brings together researchers from four countries to address the most critical challenges to tropical species through innovative and interdisciplinary research.

This session will examine tropical forest responses across a dispersed network of large-scale nutrient addition experiments synthesizing insights into nutrient acquisition, use, and cycling processes across tropical regions to establish a new framework of nutrient limitation and adaptations to overcome multiple stressors.

This session highlights the crucial role of Trees on Farms—an often overlooked agroforestry system—in enhancing ecosystem services, climate resilience, and cultural values in the tropics. It aims to assess current knowledge, increase recognition, and foster a unified research agenda among scientists and practitioners.

We explore benefits, challenges, and methods of integrating local knowledge into community-based conservation from the perspective of scientists and conservation practitioners working around the world’s tropics, sharing experiences to inspire innovative solutions for protecting biodiversity and ecosystems amidst the challenges of climate change and poverty.

Today, most of our planet's surface is under human influence and remnants of natural habitats remain in disturbed habitat fragments.  In this symposium we present the different ways pollination and plant reproduction can be impacted in a global changing environment in the Anthropocene era, particularly in the tropics.