Societal Impact Statement Cities present a unique challenge for conservation. While overall
native biodiversity is reduced, remnant habitats in the urban matrix can be important refugia …

Background The world's fast disappearing mangrove forests have low plant diversity and are
often assumed to also have a species-poor insect fauna. We here compare the tropical …

Differences in demographic and environmental niches facilitate plant species coexistence in
tropical forests. However, the adaptations that enable species to achieve higher …

The Nee Soon stream drainage in the Central Catchment Nature Reserve is virtually the last
remaining fragment of primary freshwater swamp forest in Singapore. The forest type has …

Decomposition is a key ecosystem function, and the rate of decomposition in forests affects
their carbon storage potentials. Processes and factors determining leaf litter decomposition …

Many invertebrate and plant species are difficult to identify even by taxonomic experts. This
has created a major obstacle for understanding the ecology of tropical environments. Here …

Functional traits offer generalizability to the prediction of ecosystem processes such as
production, and community-weighted mean trait values are increasingly used for such …

Extinction is a key issue in the assessment of global biodiversity. However, many extinction
rate measures do not account for species that went extinct before they could be discovered …

Questions What are the relative influences of soil and hydrology on tree community
structure, seedling survival and seedling growth? Do soil and hydrology moderate seedling …

The current paper acts as an introduction to nine following papers concerning the hydrology
and biodiversity of Nee Soon freshwater swamp forest. Freshwater swamp forest is a …