In various forest ecosystems, resprouting is an important component of biomass and individual production, with this process often being more important than production derived from recruitment from seeds (White, 1991; Bond & Midgley, 2001; Kennard et al. 2002). In particular, tropical dry forests have been suggested to have a higher share of species capable of resprouting than their moister counterparts (Bond & Midgley, 2001; Vieira & Scariot, 2006), where different types of disturbances, such as burning or even hurricanes, have been documented to have a positive effect on resprouting incidence (Dunphy, Murphy & Lugo, 2000; Kennard et al., 2002; van Bloem et al., 2007). Similarly, the population dynamics of M. acantholoba seems to be driven by resprouting, mainly over the first 5 years of succession. During this early successional period, individuals are not big enough to sustain sexual reproduction, but survival probability is very high, making resprouts very successful, in terms of height, basal diameter, cover and number of stems (Kennard et al., 2002). Thus, in this species, resprouting plays a major role in its dynamics in the early stages of succession.

However, the rapid decline in resprouting and the decrease in the probability of survival to later stages at the end of the succession and into the mature state of the forest, are the main drivers of the local extinction of M. acantholoba . This pattern is consistent with other studies showing an absence of resprouting in the mature forest (Kammesheidt, 1998; Rodrigues et al., 2004). It has been suggested that individuals derived from resprouting, having a multi-stemmed architecture, have a disadvantage in the competition for light with respect to single-stemmed individuals (Bellingham & Sparrow, 2000). This may explain why the population of M. acantholoba disappears almost completely before the end of the successional process, with only a handful of isolated individuals persisting in some patches of marginal mature forest.

Despite having a very similar resprouting probability to that of other species in the study site, M. acantholoba is the species with the highest absolute abundance of resprouts (Lebrija-Trejos, 2004). Under these conditions, it is reasonable to consider that the resprouting capacity of this species is one of the main factors in the dominance of this species, even more so than other demographic processes. Therefore, explicitly considering the resprouting ability helps better describe the dynamics of pioneer species such as M . acantholoba .