Aim Water availability is the major driver of tropical forest structure and dynamics. Most research has focused on the impacts of climatic water availability, whereas remarkably little is known about the influence of water table depth and excess soil water on forest processes. Nevertheless, given that plants take up water from the soil, the impacts of climatic water supply on plants are likely to be modulated by soil water con...

Amazonian forests continuously accumulate carbon (C) in biomass and in soil, representing a carbon sink of 0.42–0.65 GtC yr −1 . In recent decades, more than 15% of Amazonian forests have been converted into pastures, resulting in net C emissions (~200 tC ha −1 ) due to biomass burning and litter mineralization in the first years after deforestation. However, little is known about the capacity of tropical pastures to restore a...

Understanding the mechanisms generating species distributions remains a challenge, especially in hyperdiverse tropical forests. We evaluated the role of rainfall variation, soil gradients and herbivory on seedling mortality, and how variation in seedling performance along these gradients contributes to habitat specialisation. In a 4‐year experiment, replicated at the two extremes of the Amazon basin, we reciprocally transplant...

The relative contribution of gross primary production and ecosystem respiration to seasonal changes in the net carbon flux of tropical forests remains poorly quantified by both modelling and field studies. We use data assimilation to combine nine ecological time series from an eastern Amazonian forest, with mass balance constraints from an ecosystem carbon cycle model. The resulting analysis quantifies, with uncertainty estima...