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Low vegetation cover in cities result in urbanites generally receiving less exposure to nature compared to people living in rural areas. Consequently, childhood experiences in a city tend to be less nature-oriented, leading to a detachment from nature in adulthood. However, some cities may have pockets of green spaces that harbour wildlife, and interactions between people and the wildlife around them may have an influence on wildlife conservation attitudes. To investigate the relationships between childhood nature experience and attitudes towards wildlife, we carried out a survey on 1004 Singapore residents about their attitudes and tolerance towards three types of wildlife commonly encountered in Singapore. Structured equation models (SEMs) were used to model the relationship between childhood experience, attitudes towards wildlife, and tolerance levels in three scenarios of increasing damage severity to humans. We found that most respondents had low childhood nature experience, and had neutral/negative attitudes towards all three types of wildlife. Childhood experience was the strongest predictor of wildlife attitude, which varied with age, gender, education level and type of wildlife. Attitude towards wildlife was the strongest predictor of tolerance in all scenarios, while tolerance decreased with increasing severity of damage. Our findings point to the importance of childhood nature experience in shaping adult perceptions of wildlife and their willingness to coexist with wildlife. Given that Singapore is continually developing on forested land for residential and commercial purposes, wildlife encounters are predicted to increase in the future. With proper planning and education, residents near wildlife habitats can learn to live with and appreciate the wildlife around them. Accepted version

A considerable extent of interspecific hybridization among dominant canopy dipterocarp species was recently found in a tropical rain forest fragment in Singapore. However, information about the fertility of the hybrids and the growth of their successive hybrids remains limited. We studied the flowering phenology of four dipterocarp species in the genus Shorea (S. curtisii, S. leprosula, S. parvifolia, and S. macroptera) and two hybrids (S. curtisii × S. leprosula and S. leprosula × S. parvifolia) and studied the performances of seedlings reproduced from them. We observed that S. macroptera bloomed first, without overlap with congeneric species, followed by the other Shorea species and the two first filial (F1) hybrids. S. curtisii and S. leprosula, the species forming hybrids are most likely to succeed in this forest, completely overlapped with their hybrids. Fruits collected from the hybrids were viable, and these hybrid seedlings showed greater survival and a higher growth rate than those from pure species under greenhouse conditions. They included various cross types such as a backcross with each parent species. These results may imply that successive hybrids and introgression spontaneously occur among Shorea species. It may be important to consider the risk of hybridization for the management of tropical forests, particularly in degraded tropical rainforests where mechanisms of ecological isolation between closely related species might be altered. Accepted version

ForestGEO is a network of scientists and long-term forest dynamics plots (FDPs) spanning the Earth's major forest types. ForestGEO's mission is to advance understanding of the diversity and dynamics of forests and to strengthen global capacity for forest science research. ForestGEO is unique among forest plot networks in its large-scale plot dimensions, censusing of all stems ≥1 cm in diameter, inclusion of tropical, temperate and boreal forests, and investigation of additional biotic (e.g., arthropods) and abiotic (e.g., soils) drivers, which together provide a holistic view of forest functioning. The 71 FDPs in 27 countries include approximately 7.33 million living trees and about 12,000 species, representing 20% of the world's known tree diversity. With >1300 published papers, ForestGEO researchers have made significant contributions in two fundamental areas: species coexistence and diversity, and ecosystem functioning. Specifically, defining the major biotic and abiotic controls on the distribution and coexistence of species and functional types and on variation in species' demography has led to improved understanding of how the multiple dimensions of forest diversity are structured across space and time and how this diversity relates to the processes controlling the role of forests in the Earth system. Nevertheless, knowledge gaps remain that impede our ability to predict how forest diversity and function will respond to climate change and other stressors. Meeting these global research challenges requires major advances in standardizing taxonomy of tropical species, resolving the main drivers of forest dynamics, and integrating plot-based ground and remote sensing observations to scale up estimates of forest diversity and function, coupled with improved predictive models. However, they cannot be met without greater financial commitment to sustain the long-term research of ForestGEO and other forest plot networks, greatly expanded scientific capacity across the world's forested nations, and increased collaboration and integration among research networks and disciplines addressing forest science.

Background: Fragmentation can fundamentally alter the structure of tropical forests. However, the impacts of fragmentation may vary significantly among regions and lead to different outcomes.Aims: We examined the structure, composition and dynamics of a forest fragment in Singapore to investigate reasons for the apparent resilience of this forest to long-term isolation.Methods: We conducted 5 censuses of 12,688 trees ≥1-cm dbh in a 2-ha plot on the edge of the fragment between 1993 and 2012.Results: Stem density and basal area were not significantly different between 1993 and 2012 and were typical of other south-east Asian forests. However, there were short-term decreases in both variables after droughts in 1997 and 2009, both followed by recovery. Total mortality rate over the 19 years was 3.3% year−1, considerably higher than other tropical forests in Asia, but it was balanced by high recruitment. The 10 most abundant species were primary forest species, pioneer species comprised