Drought-mortality relationships for tropical forests.

By Oliver L. Phillips, G. V. D. van der Heijden, Simon L. Lewis, G. Lopez-Gonzalez, L. Aragão, J. Lloyd, Yadvinder S. Malhi, A. Monteagudo, S. Almeida, E. Dávila and 47 more. New Phytologist, 2010

595 citations recorded by the source corpus.

*The rich ecology of tropical forests is intimately tied to their moisture status. Multi-site syntheses can provide a macro-scale view of these linkages and their susceptibility to changing climates. Here, we report pan-tropical and regional-scale analyses of tree vulnerability to drought. *We assembled available data on tropical forest tree stem mortality before, during, and after recent drought events, from 119 monitoring plots in 10 countries concentrated in Amazonia and Borneo. *In most sites, larger trees are disproportionately at risk. At least within Amazonia, low wood density trees are also at greater risk of drought-associated mortality, independent of size. For comparable drought intensities, trees in Borneo are more vulnerable than trees in the Amazon. There is some evidence for lagged impacts of drought, with mortality rates remaining elevated 2 yr after the meteorological event is over. *These findings indicate that repeated droughts would shift the functional composition of tropical forests toward smaller, denser-wooded trees. At very high drought intensities, the linear relationship between tree mortality and moisture stress apparently breaks down, suggesting the existence of moisture stress thresholds beyond which some tropical forests would suffer catastrophic tree mortality.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78aa59d74170e8693388fb664161c87c8679a044

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluation of terrestrial carbon cycle models for their response to climate variability and to CO2 trends (2013, unknown): “There has been much discussion in the literature about the impact of drought on vegetation growth and mortality in tropical regions (Nepstad et al., 2004; Phillips et al., 2009, 2010; Da Costa et al., 2010).”
A synthesis of tree functional traits related to drought-induced mortality in forests across climatic zones (2017, background): “Large trees have higher mortality rates during drought than smaller trees, both in seasonally dry and in perhumid tropical environments (Phillips et al. 2010).”
Drought tolerance as predicted by leaf water potential at turgor loss point varies strongly across species within an Amazonian forest (2015, unknown): “One would expect that in a more drought-prone climate, such drought-tolerant species may gain in abundance at the expense of others (Phillips et al. 2009, 2010; Feeley et al. 2011; Fauset et al. 2012).”
Variation in above-ground forest biomass across broad climatic gradients (2011, background): “In this case both maximum individual biomass and forest biomass may decline across many forests due to increased tree mortality in the largest size classes, as has been observed recently (Nepstad et al., 2007; Brando et al., 2008; Phillips et al., 2009, 2010).”
Slow‐growing species cope best with drought: evidence from long‐term measurements in a tropical semi‐deciduous moist forest of Central Africa (2013, background): “…deciduous and large, leaf fall being a drought avoidance strategy during the dry season (Worbes 1999; Sch€ongart et al. 2002) that offsets the increased drought sensitivity due to their size (Condit, Hubbell & Foster 1995; Van Nieuwstadt & Sheil 2005; Nepstad et al. 2007; Phillips et al. 2010).”
Abiotic and biotic drivers of biomass change in a Neotropical forest (2017, background): “At large spatial scales, climate effects vary strongly and may overrule other effects (e.g. pantropical scales, Phillips et al. 2010; Banin et al. 2014), whereas at regional or local scales, soil conditions may determine demographic processes (Paoli, Curran & Zak 2005; Baribault, Kobe & Finley…”
A trait‐mediated, neighbourhood approach to quantify climate impacts on successional dynamics of tropical rainforests (2016, background): “Our finding that over annual intervals the growth of large trees of species with higher wood density is less sensitive to daily water stress supports results elsewhere linking greater wood density with resistance to drought (e.g. Santiago et al. 2004; Phil- lips et al. 2010; Poorter et al. 2010).”
The Amazon basin in transition (2012, background): “Despite this regional variability, the observations of natural droughts and the drought manipulation experiments indicate similar trends of mortality in response to dry season intensit”
Time-dependent effects of climate and drought on tree growth in a Neotropical dry forest: Short-term tolerance vs. long-term sensitivity (2014, background): “Furthermore, TDFs are 76 diverse ecosystems dominated by drought-tolerant species with varied strategies to tolerate water 77 scarcity (Markesteijn et al., 2011), but there is scarce information on how these species grow in 78 response to drought at multiple temporal scales (Phillips et al., 2010).”