Reconstructing Hurricane Disturbance in a Tropical Montane Forest Landscape in the Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic: Implications for Vegetation Patterns and Dynamics

Hurricanes are intense, frequent disturbances of Caribbean ecosystems and are important agents in structuring the region’s ecological patterns and processes. The rugged topography and diverse vegetation of Caribbean tropical montane forests interact with hurricane forces to create complex disturbance patterns. In this study, we used a 158-yr historical database of hurricane tracks to calculate fine-scale hurricane return intervals across the Caribbean, and Landsat imagery and field inventory to reconstruct wind and rain disturbance from Hurricane Georges in the Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic. Spatial patterns of disturbance from Georges and the relationship of disturbance with hurricane meteorology, topography, and vegetation were analyzed for the landscape. The long-term hurricane return interval for the Cordillera Central was 14.4 yrs. Damage from hurricane Georges was distributed over a small portion of the study area (∼330 km2 study area); only 11.3% of the study area was disturbed by wind and 4.3% by flooding. Multiple logistic regression showed that hurricane meteorology, topography, and vegetation were all significant predictors of patterns of wind disturbance. In particular, wind disturbance was concentrated in high-elevation forest types, with 12% of the total disturbed area in cloud forest and 82% in pine forest. Within the wind-disturbed areas, the degree of mortality varied markedly by forest type, with the proportion of dead basal area 9.8% higher in cloud forest, 11.4% higher in transitional pine, and 50.5% higher in pine forest compared to controls. Although much of the landscape was undisturbed by Georges, the regularity of hurricanes in the region and the magnitude of change in disturbed patches suggest that hurricanes are an important driver of forest dynamics and demonstrates the importance of sampling across gradients of disturbance severity.