The picture book that doesn’t exist: Exploring vast canopy gaps of Congo rainforests

by Anne Manning, Harvard University
October 1, 2024

“Tropical rainforest” might conjure images of close-packed trees, dense humidity, and the din of animal calls. But rainforests host landscapes beyond that archetypal one, including vast, treeless clearings that seemingly appear out of nowhere.

These strange, sudden canopy gaps, called bais, are located only in the rainforests of the Congo Basin of west-central Africa. Some stretching the length of 40 football fields, and some only a few hundred feet across, bais are the world’s largest known natural forest clearings, and they seem to play a big role in the rainforest’s highly complex, biodiverse environment.

Yet due to their remote nature, bais have been rarely studied ­–how many exist, where they are, and what ecological communities they intersect. Harvard researchers are now trying to write the playbook on bais to provide greater insight into their place in the overall forest ecosystem.

A new study in the journal Ecology provides an unprecedented, detailed overview of bais’ layout, makeup, and abundance across more than 5,000 square miles of conserved forest in Odzala-Kokoua National Park, Republic of the Congo. Culminating more than two years of field study, the work was led by Evan Hockridge, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in the lab of Andrew Davies, assistant professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

Keep reading: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1059874

Read the Ecology paper: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.4419