A growing body of evidence supports the important role of biotic and abiotic filters on species composition operating at early life history stages in determining diversity patterns of adult trees. Interspecific differences in natural enemies, life history strategies, habitat specialization, and responses to temporal environmental variation contribute to the maintenance of plant species diversity in large part through effects on seed survival and seedling establishment. Flowering, seed production and seedling recruitment in tropical forests are closely linked to inter-annual variation in climate, indicating the potential sensitivity of these processes to global and regional anthropogenic change. Inter-annual variation in limiting resources should also affect reproductive output with implications for mechanisms of species coexistence mediated by recruitment and life history variation. Changes in climate could also directly affect relative competitive abilities of species specialized to different environmental niches, or indirectly affect recruitment via pathogens and herbivores. In this session, we propose to present results from long-term studies of flower and seed production and seedling dynamics at tropical forest sites that differ significantly in diversity, disturbance regime, seasonality, and biogeographic history. These studies, each with at least a decade’s worth of data collected using standardized methods, focus on elucidating the causes and consequences of inter-annual variation in reproduction. We will focus on three objectives: (1) Quantify and explain temporal variation in reproductive output. (2) Quantify spatiotemporal variation in seed arrival and seedling recruitment. (3) Understand the consequences of variation in reproduction and seedling survival for the maintenance of tropical forest diversity. In particular, we will focus on long-term datasets so that we might distinguish signals of directional anthropogenic changes from natural cyclical changes in seed production and seedling recruitment.