Journal Article
Compositional response of Amazon forests to climate change
Adriane Esquivel‐Muelbert; Timothy R. Baker; Kyle G. Dexter; Simon L. Lewis; Roel J. W. Brienen; Ted R. Feldpausch; Jon Lloyd; Abel Monteagudo‐Mendoza; Luzmila Arroyo; Esteban Álvarez-Dávila; Niro Higuchi; Beatriz S. Marimon; Ben Hur Marimon-Junior; Marcos Silveira; Emilio Vilanova; Emanuel Gloor; Yadvinder Malhi; Jerôme Chave; Jos Barlow; Damien Bonal; Nallaret Davila Cardozo; Terry Erwin; Sophie Fauset; Bruno Hérault; Susan Laurance; Lourens Poorter; Lan Qie; Clement Stahl; Martin J. P. Sullivan; Hans ter Steege; Vincent Antoine Vos; Pieter A. Zuidema; Everton Almeida; Edmar Almeida de Oliveira; Ana Andrade; Simone Aparecida Vieira; Luiz Aragão; Alejandro Araujo‐Murakami; Eric Arets; Gerardo A. Aymard C; Christopher Baraloto; Plínio Barbosa Camargo; Jorcely G. Barroso; Frans Bongers; Rene Boot; José Luís Camargo; Wendeson Castro; Victor Chama Moscoso; James Comiskey; Fernando Cornejo Valverde; Antonio Carlos Lola da Costa; Jhon del Aguila Pasquel; Anthony Di Fiore; Luisa Fernanda Duque; Fernando Elias; Julien Engel; Gerardo Flores Llampazo; David Galbraith; Rafael Herrera Fernández; Eurídice Honorio Coronado; Wannes Hubau; Eliana Jimenez‐Rojas; Adriano José Nogueira Lima; Ricardo Keichi Umetsu; William Laurance; Gabriela Lopez‐Gonzalez; Thomas Lovejoy; Omar Aurelio Melo Cruz; Paulo S. Morandi; David Neill; Percy Núñez Vargas; Nadir C. Pallqui Camacho; Alexander Parada Gutierrez; Guido Pardo; Julie Peacock; Marielos Peña‐Claros; Maria Cristina Peñuela‐Mora; Pascal Petronelli; Georgia C. Pickavance; Nigel Pitman; Adriana Prieto; Carlos Quesada; Hirma Ramírez‐Angulo; Maxime Réjou‐Méchain; Zorayda Restrepo Correa; Anand Roopsind; Agustín Rudas; Rafael Salomão; Natalino Silva; Javier Silva Espejo; James Singh; Juliana Stropp; John Terborgh; Raquel Thomas; Marisol Toledo; Armando Torres‐Lezama; Luis Valenzuela Gamarra; Peter J. van de Meer; Geertje van der Heijden; Peter van der Hout; Rodolfo Vasquez Martinez; Cesar Vela; Ima Célia Guimarães Vieira; Oliver L. Phillips
Global Change Biology · Vol. 25, Issue 1 · pp. 39-56 · 2019
Abstract
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 records from 106 long‐term inventory plots spanning 30 years. We analyse three traits that have been hypothesized to respond to different environmental drivers (increase in moisture stress and atmospheric CO 2 concentrations): maximum tree size, biogeographic water‐deficit affiliation and wood density. Tree communities have become increasingly dominated by large‐statured taxa, but to date there has been no detectable change in mean wood density or water deficit affiliation at the community level, despite most forest plots having experienced an intensification of the dry season. However, among newly recruited trees, dry‐affiliated genera have become more abundant, while the mortality of wet‐affiliated genera has increased in those plots where the dry season has intensified most. Thus, a slow shift to a more dry‐affiliated Amazonia is underway, with changes in compositional dynamics (recruits and mortality) consistent with climate‐change drivers, but yet to significantly impact whole‐community composition. The Amazon observational record suggests that the increase in atmospheric CO 2 is driving a shift within tree communities to large‐statured species and that climate changes to date will impact forest composition, but long generation times of tropical trees mean that biodiversity change is lagging behind climate change.