Dr. Stefan SchnitzerDr. Stefan Schnitzer awarded $915,000 grant from the NSF Division of Environmental Biology (DEB). 

The grant is to study the maintenance of plant species diversity in tropical forests. The idea for the project is to test a hypothesis that some groups of  plant species maintain diversity for the entire community by suppressing the most aggressive species, preventing these aggressive species from displacing less aggressive species, and thus maintaining the diversity of the entire community. This hypothesis has been tested successfully in simple marine ecosystems; however, it has never been attempted in complex ecosystems such as tropical forests.