Fig. 4.

Dynamical behavior of the size distribution as a function of age since disturbance for tropical deciduous forests in Guanacaste, Costa Rica., The data are for 13 transects in forests of known and accurately estimated ages (see ref. 14). All forests <100 years are known to be recovering pasture land. The gray line is the exponent predicted once the forest has reached demographic and resource steady state. Plotted is the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) for the power-law fit to the each of the forests through time. The star symbols are for the undisturbed San Emilio forest (see Figs. 1 and 2). After ≈50–80 years the forests appear to converge around the predicted exponent of −2.