HIPPNET

Our Vision: A climate-vegetation observatory for building capacity to understand, conserve, and manage Hawaiian forest ecosystems in a rapidly changing world

The Hawai’i Permanent Plot Network (HIPPNET) was initiated in 2007 by faculty and research ecologists at the University of Hawaii, USDA Forest Service, and UCLA to investigate forest dynamics across the Island of Hawai’i.

The long-term goal is to establish large-scale, permanent plots in native-dominated forest across elevation and precipitation gradients throughout the Hawaiian Islands. Long-term forest dynamics plots have been established worldwide; these plots establish Hawai’i as part of the The Center for Tropical Forest Science and Forest Global Earth Observatories (CTFS-ForestGEO) network.

Four plots on the Island of Hawai’i have been established within the network: the Laupāhoehoe plot represents montane wet forest, the Palamanui plot represents lowland dry forest, the Mamalahoa plot represents ‘ōhi’a dominated dry forest, and the Sanctuary plot at Puʻu Waʻawaʻa represents montane mesic forest.

In keeping with protocols used for creating permanent plots in temperate and tropical forests worldwide, all of the plots are located in areas with good access, strong commitment from landholders and local communities toward conservation, and high native species cover. The permanent plots are established following widely used protocols developed for tropical and temperate forests by the CTFS-ForestGEO. Within each plot all free-standing native woody plants ≥1 cm in diameter are tagged and mapped. The forest plots will be re-censused every 5 years, with some annual surveys when possible.

The data collected through coordinated projects carried out at the HIPPNET sites will enable the University of Hawaii and collaborators to become leaders in numerous important areas of ecology and will add substantially to our understanding of forest dynamics.

Laupahoehoe Phenocam – Click on the link to learn more about the latest picture taken by the phenocam on the HIPPNET weather tower in Laupahoehoe, updated several times a day. The camera is part of a global PhenoCam network, hosted by Harvard University.

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Related Projects

Our Mission:

In order to effectively conserve and manage forests to enhance their resiliency and predict their future structure and function in light of these drivers of change, forest managers need to understand how forests respond to spatial and temporal environmental variation. The Hawaii Permanent Plot Network (HIPPNET) was established in 2007 with the goal of advancing understanding of the composition, structure, and function of forest ecosystems in Hawaii over time through regular, rigorous, detailed, standardized, and long-term measurement of vegetation paired with detailed measurements of above canopy, within canopy and below canopy climate variables. This research occurs at two Center for Tropical Forest Science forest dynamics plots (CTFS FDPs) on the Island of Hawaii, as well as a series of smaller plots that take advantage of and are located across the steep environmental gradients common to Pacific high islands. The two CTFS FDPs are four hectares in size, and are located in Laupāhoehoe (Tropical Montane Wet Forest) and Pālamanui (Tropical Lowland Dry Forest). Additional, smaller plots are located in montane mesic and lowland woodland ecosystems, and across a 5.2°C mean annual temperature gradient in tropical montane wet forest.  Collectively, these plots contribute to: 1) local understanding of how climate drives forest dynamics in contrasting ecosystems; 2) regional understanding of drivers of forest dynamics that are needed to inform management and conservation of Hawaii’s threatened native forests; and 3) global understanding of forest dynamics through largescale syntheses of data from across the CTFS’s Global Ecological Observatory spanning tropical, temperate and boreal forests. In addition to the basic and applied science conducted in these plots, this project supports postdoctoral scientists, graduate and undergraduate students, and field technicians who are exposed to research skills, varied learning opportunities, and real-world professional experiences.