The Afrotropics are experiencing some of the fastest urbanisation rates on the planet but the impact of city growth on their rich and unique biodiversity remains understudied, especially compared to natural baselines. Little is also known about how introduced species influence β-diversity in these contexts, and how patterns coincide with native ranges of species. Here we investigated how tree assemblages of the...
Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain underst...
Climate change and biodiversity loss are deeply intertwined anthropogenic global crises, for which forests provide powerful nature-based solutions. Biodiverse forests are more resilient to climate change than monocultures, thereby enhancing long-term carbon storage and ecosystem-based adaptation. Awareness of these interdependencies is slowly growing, but we know little about how countries are considering biodi...
Made available in DSpace on 2021-06-25T11:16:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2021-01-01; Agence Nationale Des Parcs Nationaux; Centre for International Forestry Research; Departamento Administrativo de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (COLCIENCIAS); David and Lucile Packard Foundation; European Space Agency; Leverhulme Trust; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa ...
Made available in DSpace on 2021-06-25T10:27:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2021-01-01; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES); The forests of Amazonia are among the most biodiverse plant communities on Earth. Given the immediate threats posed by climate and land-use change, an improved understanding of how this extraordinary biodiversity is spatially organized...
The sensitivity of tropical forest carbon to climate is a key uncertainty in predicting global climate change. Although short-term drying and warming are known to affect forests, it is unknown if such effects translate into long-term responses. Here, we analyze 590 permanent plots measured across the tropics to derive the equilibrium climate controls on forest carbon. Maximum temperature is the most important p...
The rate of above-ground woody biomass production, WP, in some western Amazon forests exceeds those in the east by a factor of 2 or more. Underlying causes may include climate, soil nutrient limitations and species composition. In this modelling paper, we explore the implications of allowing key nutrients such as N and P to constrain the photosynthesis of Amazon forests, and also we examine the relationship bet...
Competition among trees is an important driver of community structure and dynamics in tropical forests. Neighboring trees may impact an individual tree’s growth rate and probability of mortality, but large-scale geographic and environmental variation in these competitive effects has yet to be evaluated across the tropical forest biome. We quantified effects of competition on tree-level basal area growth and mor...
Understanding the relationships between plant traits and ecosystem properties at large spatial scales is important for predicting how compositional change will affect carbon cycling in tropical forests. In this study, we examine the relationships between species wood density, maximum height and above-ground, coarse wood production of trees ≥10 cm diameter (CWP) for 60 Amazonian forest plots. Average species max...
Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, but the estimated species richness is very much debated. Here, we apply an ensemble of parametric estimators and a novel technique that includes conspecific spatial aggregation to an extended database of forest plots with up-to-date taxonomy. We show that the species abundance distribution of Amazonia is best approximated by a logseries with aggregated individuals,...