Growth pattern and age determination for Cecropia sciadophylla (Urticaceae).

Cecropia species, ranging from Mexico to northern Argentina and the West Indies, are pioneer trees that colonize cleared areas with high light. To determine their ages to help pinpoint the date of the area's disturbance, we need to understand their developmental and architectural changes over time. The simple architecture of Cecropia conforms to the model of Rauh; that is, it has orthotropic axes with lateral flowering and rhythmic branching. The axes are made of a succession of nodes and internodes whose length and associated lateral productions remain measurable for years. Thus, by describing the tree trunk node by node, we can depict the sequence of events involved in tree development. For 25 trees of C. sciadophylla, from two stations in French Guiana and Colombia, we recorded internode length and any presence of branches, and flowers for each node. Using autocorrelation coefficients, we found a high periodicity in flowering and branching, with inflorescences at every 25 nodes, stages of branches spaced by a multiple of 25 nodes, and alternation of long and short nodes every 25 nodes. Considering that flowering is annual for many Cecropia species, the main conclusion of this work is that C. sciadophylla has strong annual growth, branching, and flowering rhythms. In addition, the age of the tree can be estimated retrospectively by observing its adult morphology.