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Stephen P. Hubbell is an American ecologist on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of the unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography, which seeks to explain the diversity and relative abundance of species in ecological communities. Dr. Hubbell is also a senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. He is also well known for tropical forest studies. In 1980 he and Robin Foster of the Field Museum in Chicago, launched the first of the 50 hectare forest dynamics studies on [Barro Colorado Island ] in Panama, and this plot became the flagship of a global network of large permanent forest dynamics plots, all following identical measurement protocols. This global network now has more than 40 plots in 22 tropical countries, and these plots contain more than 8000 tree species and 6 million individual trees that are tagged, mapped, and monitored long-term for growth, survival and recruitment. The [ Center for Tropical Forest Science ] coordinates research across global network of plots through the [ Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute ]. Since 2008 the program has expanded into the temperate zone, and is now known as the [ Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory ] or SIGEO.
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