Esquivel Muelbert, A, Galbraith, D, Dexter, KG et al. (7 more authors) (2017) Biogeographic distributions of neotropical trees reflect their directly measured drought tolerances. Scientific Reports, 7. 8334. ISSN 2045-2322
Abstract
High levels of species diversity hamper current understanding of how tropical forests may respond to environmental change. In the tropics, water availability is a leading driver of the diversity and distribution of tree species, suggesting that many tropical taxa may be physiologically incapable of tolerating dry conditions, and that their distributions along moisture gradients can be used to predict their drought tolerance. While this hypothesis has been explored at local and regional scales, large continental-scale tests are lacking. We investigate whether the relationship between drought-induced mortality and distributions holds continentally by relating experimental and observational data of drought-induced mortality across the Neotropics to the large-scale bioclimatic distributions of 115 tree genera. Across the different experiments, genera affiliated to wetter climatic regimes show higher drought-induced mortality than dry-affiliated ones, even after controlling for phylogenetic relationships. This pattern is stronger for adult trees than for saplings or seedlings, suggesting that the environmental filters exerted by drought impact adult tree survival most strongly. Overall, our analysis of experimental, observational, and bioclimatic data across neotropical forests suggests that increasing moisture-stress is indeed likely to drive significant changes in floristic composition.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2017, the Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Drought-tolerance; Tropical Forest; Amazon; through-fall exclusion experiments; Climate change; Trees |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Ecology & Global Change (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EU - European Union 291585 (ERC 2011 ADG) NERC NE/N004655/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 01 Sep 2017 10:09 |
Last Modified: | 16 Apr 2019 11:42 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41598-017-08105-8 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:118889 |