The surge in global efforts to understand the causes and consequences of drought on forest ecosystems has tended to focus on specific impacts such as mortality. We propose an ecoclimatic framework that takes a broader view of the ecological relevance of water deficits, linking elements of exposure and resilience to cumulative impacts on a range of ecosystem processes. This ecoclimatic framework is underpinned by two hypotheses...

Climate is predicted to change rapidly in the current century, which may lead to shifts of species' ranges, reduced populations and extinctions. Predicting the responses of species abundance to climate change can provide valuable information to quantify climate change impacts and inform their management and conservation, but most studies have been limited to changes in habitat area due to a lack of abundance data. Here, we use...

Habitat fragmentation is a severe threat to tropical biotas, but its long‐term effects are poorly understood. We evaluated longer‐term changes in the abundance of larger (>1 kg) mammals in fragmented and intact rainforest and in riparian “corridors” in tropical Queensland, with data from 190 spotlighting surveys conducted in 1986–1987 and 2006–2007. In 1986–1987 when most fragments were already 20–50 years old, mammal assembla...

In contrast to the significant importance of tropical rainforest ecosystems as one of the major sources within the global atmospheric N 2 O budget (2.2–3.7 Tg N yr −1 ), regional estimates of their N 2 O source strength are still limited and highly uncertain. To contribute toward more reliable estimates of the N 2 O source strength of tropical rainforest ecosystems on a regional scale, we modified a process‐oriented biogeochem...

Primary events in photosynthetic (PS) acclimation to elevated CO 2 concentration ([CO 2 ]) occur at the molecular level in leaf mesophyll cells, but final growth response to [CO 2 ] involves acclimation responses associated with photosynthate partitioning among plant organs in relation to resources limiting growth. Source–sink interactions, particularly with regard to carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), are key determinants of PS acc...