Paul Fine, a tropical biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, approached Biotropica with the idea for the special issue after helping organize a symposium at a 2013 meeting ATBC held in Costa Rica on white-sand forest ecology and evolution and coming away impressed by the breadth of the talks.

“I thought a special issue would be a good way to get many of these studies published and it would be fun to include some reviews and syntheses with these articles to spur on future research,” Fine told Mongabay, “and also get some attention paid to the conservation status of these fragile environments.”

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