As a sustainable forest management engineer, Styven brings robust nursery and forest management expertise. He’s adept at devising scalable solutions for intricate technical challenges. Styven’s work spans diverse projects, including research initiatives like RESSAC. He is the national winner of the MIMES project and a finalist for the RFI Young Writers Prize.
Light exposure at seedling and adult stages has been used to characterize the ecological profile of tropical trees, with many implications in forest management and restoration ecology. Understanding how light heterogeneity affects phenotypic plasticity of tropical tree species allows predicting the effect of environmental change on their fitness. For instance, the seedlings of light-demanding species have a higher specific leaf area at low irradiance. At adult stage, the light demanding tree species tended to have a lowest specific leaf area. The question is whether species are adapted to the light conditions they experience for a relatively brief period as a seedling or for a long period as an adult. This research project aims to quantify the light trajectory from seedlings to adult tree in order to define functional groups among 45 coexisting tropical tree species in central Africa. We address three research questions: (i) in seedling, how the morphological, physiological and biomass allocation traits change according to light intensity? (ii) do species differ in their height–light trajectories from seedling to adult tree? and (iii) how are seedling traits associated to adult tree traits and which functional groups can be distinguished from these associations?