Elfin forests face many threats, among these are climate change and hurricanes. On September 20th Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico, changing the amount of forest cover, with likely changes in habitat structure and microclimate. This study evaluates the state of Lepanthes woodburyana, an epiphyte endemic to Puerto Rico, after Hurricane Maria. Specifically, populations located in the El Toro Trail of the El Yunque National Forest along elfin forest areas. This study will address the question of what environmental factors are associated with variation in the probability of occurrence of dark spots on leaves of Lepanthes woodburyana. The dark spots on these leaves could be a symptom of poor plant condition related to high light exposure, low humidity, and high temperatures. If so we expect a negative association between the presence and frequency of dark spots, reproductive activity and high light levels, low humidity, and high temperatures. To address this hypothesis, we will be monitoring plant reproductive activity, leaf health, canopy cover, orchid life stage and temperature using trees tagged along the trail. We will test for associations among these variables using correlations analyses in R and multiple regression analyses.
Results/Conclusions
Surveys yielded 526 individuals of L. woodburyana, from these we obtained a trend of individuals with no spots. However, we found that temperature was correlated with the presence of spots, the higher the temperature the higher probability of having spots. This could be due to the fact that these orchids could have acclimated, producing new leaves with physiological modifications. Canopy cover was weakly correlated with the presence of spots, although this could be due to the fact that our surveys were conducted almost a year after the hurricane, when vegetation has grown and canopy cover may recuperate. Although spots were not found to be correlated to orchid reproduction, relative humidity, temperature and the angle at which the orchid was positioned on the tree did influence reproduction. Epiphytes are important to tropical cloud forest and knowing how these species react to upcoming changes like climate change means coming up with better conservation and management practices. Hence studying plants like L. woodburyana can help understand how other epiphytes of the same genus that are rare or threatened may behave and how resilient this genus can be when faced with changes in microclimatic conditions.