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 ...
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...
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...
Forest structure and dynamics vary across the Amazon Basin in an east-west gradient coincident with variations in soil fertility and geology. This has resulted in the hypothesis that soil fertility may play an important role in explaining Basin-wide variations in forest biomass, growth and stem turnover rates. Soil samples were collected in a total of 59 different forest plots across the Amazon Basin and analys...
Climate, species composition, and soils are thought to control carbon cycling and forest structure in Amazonian forests. Here, we add a demographics scheme (tree recruitment, growth, and mortality) to a recently developed non-demographic model—the Trait-based Forest Simulator (TFS)—to explore the roles of climate and plant traits in controlling forest productivity and structure. We compared two sites with diffe...
Leaves in tropical forests come in an enormous variety of sizes and shapes, each of which can be ultimately viewed as an adaptation to the complex problem of optimising the capture of light for photosynthesis. However, the fact that many different shape "strategies" coexist within a habitat demonstrate that there are many other intrinsic and extrinsic factors involved, such as the differential investment in sup...
Within the tropics, the species richness of tree communities is strongly and positively associated with precipitation. Previous research has suggested that this macroecological pattern is driven by the negative effect of water-stress on the physiological processes of most tree species. This implies that the range limits of taxa are defined by their ability to occur under dry conditions, and thus in terms of spe...
While Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, the abundance of trees is skewed strongly towards relatively few â € hyperdominantâ €™ species. In addition to their diversity, Amazonian trees are a key component of the global carbon cycle, assimilating and storing more carbon than any other ecosystem on Earth. Here we ask, using a unique data set of 530 forest plots, if the functions of storing and produci...
Leaf size influences many aspects of tree function such as rates of transpiration and photosynthesis and, consequently, often varies in a predictable way in response to environmental gradients. The recent development of pan-Amazonian databases based on permanent botanical plots has now made it possible to assess trends in leaf size across environmental gradients in Amazonia. Previous plot-based studies have sho...
Most of the planet's diversity is concentrated in the tropics, which includes many regions undergoing rapid climate change. Yet, while climate-induced biodiversity changes are widely documented elsewhere, few studies have addressed this issue for lowland tropical ecosystems. Here we investigate whether the floristic and functional composition of intact lowland Amazonian forests have been changing by evaluating ...