Organisms have evolved diverse adaptive strategies to cope with environmental fluctuations. Slow‐growing long‐lived species tend to exhibit low temporal variability in population growth (strongly buffered demographically), whereas fast‐growing short‐lived species optimize growth in favorable years (weakly buffered). These patterns set up the expectation that differentiation in demographic buffering may reduce disparities in lo...

The strength and persistence of the tropical carbon sink hinges on the long‐term responses of woody growth to climatic variations and increasing CO 2 . However, the sensitivity of tropical woody growth to these environmental changes is poorly understood, leading to large uncertainties in growth predictions. Here, we used tree ring records from a Southeast Asian tropical forest to constrain ED2.2‐hydro, a terrestrial biosphere...

Demographic compensation—the opposing responses of vital rates along environmental gradients—potentially delays anticipated species’ range contraction under climate change, but no consensus exists on its actual contribution. We calculated population growth rate (λ) and demographic compensation across the distributional ranges of 81 North American tree species and examined their responses to simulated warming and tree competiti...

Tree rings provide an invaluable long‐term record for understanding how climate and other drivers shape tree growth and forest productivity. However, conventional tree‐ring analysis methods were not designed to simultaneously test effects of climate, tree size, and other drivers on individual growth. This has limited the potential to test ecologically relevant hypotheses on tree growth sensitivity to environmental drivers and...

Estimates of the percentage of species “committed to extinction” by climate change range from 15% to 37%. The question is whether factors other than climate need to be included in models predicting species’ range change. We created demographic range models that include climate vs. climate‐plus‐competition, evaluating their influence on the geographic distribution of Pinus edulis , a pine endemic to the semiarid southwestern U....

Droughts in a warming climate have become more common and more extreme, making understanding forest responses to water stress increasingly pressing. Analysis of water stress in trees has long focused on water potential in xylem and leaves, which influences stomatal closure and water flow through the soil‐plant‐atmosphere continuum. At the same time, changes of vegetation water content (VWC) are linked to a range of tree respon...

Atmospheric CO 2 ( c a ) rise changes the physiology and possibly growth of tropical trees, but these effects are likely modified by climate. Such c a × climate interactions importantly drive CO 2 fertilization effects of tropical forests predicted by global vegetation models, but have not been tested empirically. Here we use tree‐ring analyses to quantify how c a rise has shifted the sensitivity of tree stem growth to annual...

The effect of logging on atmospheric carbon concentrations remains highly contested, especially in the tropics where it is associated to forest degradation. To contribute to this discussion, we estimated the carbon balance from logging natural tropical forests in Costa Rica through a life cycle accounting approach. Our system included all major life cycle processes at a regional level during one rotation period (15 years). We...

High‐elevation forests are experiencing high rates of warming, in combination with CO 2 rise and (sometimes) drying trends. In these montane systems, the effects of environmental changes on tree growth are also modified by elevation itself, thus complicating our ability to predict effects of future climate change. Tree‐ring analysis along an elevation gradient allows quantifying effects of gradual and annual environmental chan...

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...

The important role of tropical forests in the global carbon cycle makes it imperative to assess changes in their carbon dynamics for accurate projections of future climate–vegetation feedbacks. Forest monitoring studies conducted over the past decades have found evidence for both increasing and decreasing growth rates of tropical forest trees. The limited duration of these studies restrained analyses to decadal scales, and it...