Different ways and perspectives on how political processes and motivation influence conservation science and practice will be discussed by speakers with varied experiences linking multiple dimensions and scales of the science-policy-politics interface.

This symposium will communicate ongoing research that uses plant functional traits to enhance our understanding of tropical montane forest ecology.

This symposium is a great opportunity for communicating ongoing long term ecological research in Venezuela while simultaneously serving as a channel to call for a wider attention to the risks of losing a highly valuable and critical scientific infrastructure for the tropics.

In this session, we will discuss the potential of cocoa, coffee, and rubber agroforestry systems in aiding global restoration efforts and human wellbeing with a focus on a transdisciplinary research network, ecological and technology tools, as well as social and biological diversity.

Silvopasture is promoted as a sustainable farming method that can have environmental, biodiversity, social and economic benefits; through a transdisciplinary approach we consider the impacts of key elements of silvopasture implementation on biodiversity and farmers’ livelihoods.

Understanding soil biodiversity driven processes function, and delivery of ecosystem services, are crucial to promote knowledgeable functional diversity management to prevent crossing tipping points. We discuss options to prevent passing tipping points, by the governance of “functional diversity” across the biophysical, economic, and societal levels using southwestern Amazonia as blueprint.

The resilience of tropical ecosystem forests and savannas to fire is based on short long term responses and can take different trajectories. Here, we propose a session to assess responses at the level of individual to community, and across different vegetation types and contexts.

Recent reports have drawn attention to declines in insect abundance, biomass, species richness, and their distribution. Whether the rates of declines for tropical insects are on par with or exceed those reported for groups such as vertebrates or plants still remains unknown. The goal of our symposium is to bridge theoretical perspectives and long-term studies with the latest research on the mechanisms associated with tropical insect declines.

This session will focus on insights into mitigating conflict and promoting a peaceful coexistence of humans and wildlife throughout Africa.

This symposium will compare the responses of different wildlife species to natural disasters to increase our understanding of the various adaptations used to survive following severe habitat destruction and allowing better mitigation of negative impacts following future events.

The aim of the Symposium is to integrate results from successional forests in order to characterize how local and landscape factors affect seed dispersal in human-modified landscapes and their consequences for forest regeneration to analyze the potential challenges on the regeneration of human-modified landscapes.

Our symposium considers the topic of seed fate (e.g., seed dispersal, seed predation, and plant recruitment)--a topic of great importance for understanding tropical ecosystems that are currently undergoing dramatic, rapid change in the Anthropocene.

Discuss critical aspects of species interaction that influence tropical biota and their sensitivities to climate change.

Tropical ecosystems are facing a rapidly changing world raising pressing questions about the effects of climate change in tropical forests. In this symposium, we will present different approaches to evidence the effects of climate change in the species composition and ecosystem function across the Andes-to-Amazon forests.

In this symposium, Gabriela Montejo-Kovacevich, Pol Pintanel, Maria Paniw and Agustín Camacho will showcase different approaches to study adaptative, behavioural, and demographic responses to climate variability in tropical South America and Africa, which ultimately will determine their vulnerability to climate change.