DESCRIPTION: The largest trees in the background are the forest dominants, yet MMSS students quantified the fact that they are almost absent from the seedling population (less than 1%). The afternoon discussion focused on theories of forest renewal, with this example as the specific case. A naive student of the forest might expect the most frequent tree in the largest size class to be the most frequent in the seedling class. We collected data, and the dominant tree is 63% of our largest class and rapidly decreases to less than 1% of the seedling class! Is the forest dying out – since the major tree species shows no sign of renewing itself?