Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J, Oliveras, I, Rifai, S et al. (16 more authors) (2019) Drier tropical forests are susceptible to functional changes in response to a long‐term drought. Ecology Letters, 22 (5). pp. 855-856. ISSN 1461-023X
Abstract
Climatic changes have profound effects on the distribution of biodiversity, but untangling the links between climatic change and ecosystem functioning is challenging, particularly in high diversity systems such as tropical forests. Tropical forests may also show different responses to a changing climate, with baseline climatic conditions potentially inducing differences in the strength and timing of responses to droughts. Trait‐based approaches provide an opportunity to link functional composition, ecosystem function and environmental changes. We demonstrate the power of such approaches by presenting a novel analysis of long‐term responses of different tropical forest to climatic changes along a rainfall gradient. We explore how key ecosystem's biogeochemical properties have shifted over time as a consequence of multi‐decadal drying. Notably, we find that drier tropical forests have increased their deciduous species abundance and generally changed more functionally than forests growing in wetter conditions, suggesting an enhanced ability to adapt ecologically to a drying environment.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by CNRS and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Drying climate; ecosystem functioning; plant traits; tropical forests; West Africa |
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 NERC NE/D005590/1 Royal Society No External Ref |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 12 Feb 2019 12:38 |
Last Modified: | 25 Apr 2019 08:32 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/ele.13243 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:142353 |
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