Darien National Park, located in eastern Panama near the border with Colombia, protects a spectacular wilderness area. The park is surrounded by lowlands that are exploited by indigenous people as well as descendants of Africans. The most important and also most overexploited resource is Prioria copaifera, a legume tree known locally as cativo. These are found in areas that are seasonally inundated, including the extensive tidal areas of the lower Rio Tuira and its tributaries. Cativo also commonly occurs in mondominant stands, that is where more than 90% of the canopy trees are cativo. Due to its high abundance, easy access from rivers, and utility for plywood, cativo stands have been fully exploited in the last 40 years.

Beginning in December 1996, Panama's Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente (ANAM) was funded for four years by the International Tropical Timber Organization to develop a management plan for cativo. I helped initiate and also am a consultant on this project. The current Project Director is Jose Solis of ANAM. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) has been responsible for setting up permanent forest plots to measure growth, mortality, recruitment, wood volume, etc. Bil Grauel has led a team of workers in Darien and, while working under extremely difficult conditions since the project's inception, has obtained extensive, multi-year data from permanent plots at four sites as well as from a number of ancillary sites. He found that growth rates at sites dominated by cativo vary considerably and that all of the easily accessible sites have been overexploited. The highly variable growth rates and the overexploitation emphasize the importance of developing and applying a management plan. Knowledge gained from this project can improve natural forest management as well as improve the long term prospects of the park and its buffer zones.

A second component investigates the origin and maintenance of monodominance by cativo. This question is important because seasonally inundated areas in the central Amazon maintain high diversity. The simple explanation that monodominance results from the stress due to flooding fails to explain mondominance in one area but high diversity in another. Omar Lopez has focused on this question for his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Utah. Omar has investigated seed dispersal and the ability of seeds to survive floating as well as the tolerance of seedlings to flooding and to flooding followed by drought. His results suggest that all of these factors likely play a role in monodominance.

This project was completed in 2001 and also funded the investigation of the tagua palm by Dr. Jim Dalling.