Reis, SM, Marimon, BS, Esquivel-Muelbert, A et al. (9 more authors) (2022) Climate and crown damage drive tree mortality in Southern Amazonian edge forests. Journal of Ecology, 110 (4). pp. 876-888. ISSN 0022-0477
Abstract
1. Tree death is a key process for our understanding of how forests are and will respond to global change. The extensive forests across the southern Amazonia edge—the driest, warmest and most fragmented of the Amazon regions—provide a window onto what the future of large parts of Amazonia may look like. Understanding tree mortality and its drivers here is essential to anticipate the process across other parts of the basin.
2. Using 10 years of data from a widespread network of long-term forest plots, we assessed how trees die (standing, broken or uprooted) and used generalised mixed-effect models to explore the contribution of plot-, species- and tree-level factors to the likelihood of tree death.
3. Most trees died from stem breakage (54%); a smaller proportion died standing (41%), while very few were uprooted (5%). The mortality rate for standing dead trees was greatest in forests subject to the most intense dry seasons.
4. While trees with the crown more exposed to light were more prone to death from mechanical damage, trees less exposed were more susceptible to death from drought.
5. At the species level, mortality rates were lowest for those species with the greatest wood density. At the individual tree level, physical damage to the crown via branch breakage was the strongest predictor of tree death.
6. Synthesis. Wind- and water deficit-driven disturbances are the main causes of tree death in southern Amazonia edge which is concerning considering the predicted increase in seasonality for Amazonia, especially at the edge. Tree mortality here is greater than any in other Amazonian region, thus any increase in mortality here may represent a tipping point for these forests.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. Journal of Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. 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. |
Keywords: | climate change; disturbance; forest dynamics; forest structure; growth rate; tree death; water deficit; wood density |
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 758873 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 22 Feb 2022 16:01 |
Last Modified: | 17 Mar 2023 04:05 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/1365-2745.13849 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:183868 |