Assessing Evidence for a Pervasive Alteration in Tropical Tree Communities
Jérôme Chave,Richard Condit,Helene C. Muller-Landau,Sean C. Thomas,Peter S. Ashton,Sarayudh Bunyavejchewin,Leonardo Co,H. S. Dattaraja,Stuart J. Davies,Stuart J. Davies,Shameema Esufali,Corneille E. N. Ewango,Kenneth J. Feeley,Robin B. Foster,Nimal Gunatilleke,Savitri Gunatilleke,Pamela Hall,Terese B. Hart,Consuelo Hernandez,Stephen P. Hubbell,Akira Itoh,Somboon Kiratiprayoon,James V. LaFrankie,Suzanne Loo de Lao,Jean-Remy Makana,Md. Nur Supardi Noor,Abdul Rahman Kassim,Cristián Samper,Raman Sukumar,Hebbalalu S. Suresh,Sylvester Tan,Jill Thompson,Ma. Dolores C Tongco,Renato Valencia,Martha Isabel Vallejo,Gorky Villa,Takuo Yamakura,Jess K. Zimmerman,Elizabeth Losos +38 more
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The results do not support the hypothesis that fast-growing species are consistently increasing in dominance in tropical tree communities, and suggest that plots may be simultaneously recovering from past disturbances and affected by changes in resource availability.Abstract:
In Amazonian tropical forests, recent studies have reported increases in aboveground biomass and in primary productivity, as well as shifts in plant species composition favouring fast-growing species over slow-growing ones. This pervasive alteration of mature tropical forests was attributed to global environmental change, such as an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, nutrient deposition, temperature, drought frequency, and/or irradiance. We used standardized, repeated measurements of over 2 million trees in ten large (16–52 ha each) forest plots on three continents to evaluate the generality of these findings across tropical forests. Aboveground biomass increased at seven of our ten plots, significantly so at four plots, and showed a large decrease at a single plot. Carbon accumulation pooled across sites was significant (+0.24 MgC ha−1 y−1, 95% confidence intervals [0.07, 0.39] MgC ha−1 y−1), but lower than reported previously for Amazonia. At three sites for which we had data for multiple census intervals, we found no concerted increase in biomass gain, in conflict with the increased productivity hypothesis. Over all ten plots, the fastest-growing quartile of species gained biomass (+0.33 [0.09, 0.55] % y−1) compared with the tree community as a whole (+0.15 % y−1); however, this significant trend was due to a single plot. Biomass of slow-growing species increased significantly when calculated over all plots (+0.21 [0.02, 0.37] % y−1), and in half of our plots when calculated individually. Our results do not support the hypothesis that fast-growing species are consistently increasing in dominance in tropical tree communities. Instead, they suggest that our plots may be simultaneously recovering from past disturbances and affected by changes in resource availability. More long-term studies are necessary to clarify the contribution of global change to the functioning of tropical forests.read more
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References
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Climate change 2007: the physical science basis
Susan Solomon,Dahe Qin,Martin R. Manning,Melinda Marquis,Kristen Averyt,Melinda M.B. Tignor,H. L. Miller,Z. Chen +7 more
TL;DR: The first volume of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report as mentioned in this paper was published in 2007 and covers several topics including the extensive range of observations now available for the atmosphere and surface, changes in sea level, assesses the paleoclimatic perspective, climate change causes both natural and anthropogenic, and climate models for projections of global climate.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas (excluding Antarctica) at a spatial resolution of 30 arc s (often referred to as 1-km spatial resolution).
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Climate change 2007 : the physical science basis : contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a historical overview of climate change science, including changes in atmospheric constituents and radiative forcing, as well as changes in snow, ice, and frozen ground.
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