How Al Gentry Changed Tropical Ecology

Alwyn Gentry’s ecological legacy is rich and vibrant. It comes from his drive to revolutionize plant identification and to apply these innovations to understand tropical forests both in detail and as a whole. It stems too from his passion for plants and forests, and the attention he gave those who shared his love for the natural world. Here I explore the impacts of Gentry’s approach and findings on tropical ecological science today. The big challenges that always face those wanting to understand tropical forests are their high diversity and the fact that most of the time plants here are sterile, while identification depends on reproductive structures. Because flowers are least accessible for the canopy trees and lianas that dominate tropical forests, this affects our ability to measure biodiversity, understand it, and monitor its persistence over time. Gentry has helped to make all these possible. Thanks to his innovations in plant identification and his vision in applying them to whole forests, tropical floristic inventory and ecological monitoring have become almost commonplace and, crucially, replicated across time and space. We now know which forests are most diverse, and why, and how their composition changes over space, climate, and soil. Gentry’s insights and methods help us better understand where conservation needs to focus, how forest people use their environment, and how global changes impact the biodiversity and carbon of Earth’s most complex ecosystems. Finally, his influence includes lasting impacts not simply on what we have learned, but also on how we do our science, and even on who does it.