I believe this is the paper (that’s a story that would be well worth blogging on as well)

Jipp, P. H., D. C. Nepstad, D. K. Cassel, and C. R. Carvalho. 1998. Deep soil moisture storage and transpiration in forests and pastures of seasonally-dry Amazonia. Climatic Change 39:395-412.

Mary

Dry forest trees put much more of their biomass below ground – they need more roots to forage for water. I suppose just doing that gives them an advantage when it comes to sprouting – the stem may represent as little as 50% of the biomass of a dry forest tree, while it’s likely to represent 70 or even 90% of the biomass of a rainforest tree (pulling the RF figures off the top of my head, so they may be wrong). That alone is likely to give dry forest trees a leg up when it comes to sprouting. Also many dry forest trees are also savanna trees (or their close relatives) – in savannas, of course, sprouting is an adaptation to fire.

That isn’ t to say that rainforest trees don’t sprout when cut. They’re just less good at it. (There’s an interesting series on sprouting in wetter forests after Hurricane Joan, I think, in Nicaragua. John Vandermeer was one of the authors on that set of papers. Something else worth blogging about.)

It’s especially intriguing to me that dry forests are dominated by species that sprout when cut and, by implication, rain forests are not dominated by such species but rather by species that depend on seed germination for reproduction. I had come to think that tropical plants in general were apt to sprout when cut, so this observation was an eye-opener to me.

Mary