Sensitivity of South American tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly

Abstract

The tropical forest carbon sink is known to be drought sensitive, but it is unclear which forests are the most vulnerable to extreme events. Forests with hotter and drier baseline conditions may be protected by prior adaptation, or more vulnerable because they operate closer to physiological limits. Here we report that forests in drier South American climates experienced the greatest impacts of the 2015–2016 El Niño, indicating greater vulnerability to extreme temperatures and drought. The long-term, ground-measured tree-by-tree responses of 123 forest plots across tropical South America show that the biomass carbon sink ceased during the event with carbon balance becoming indistinguishable from zero (−0.02 ± 0.37 Mg C ha−1 per year). However, intact tropical South American forests overall were no more sensitive to the extreme 2015–2016 El Niño than to previous less intense events, remaining a key defence against climate change as long as they are protected.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Bennett, AC de Sousa, TR Monteagudo-Mendoza, A Esquivel-Muelbert, A Morandi, PS Coelho de Souza, F Castro, W Duque, LF Flores Llampazo, G dos Santos, RM Ramos, E Vilanova Torre, E Alvarez-Davila, E Baker, TR Costa, FRC Lewis, SL Marimon, BS Schietti, J Burban, B Berenguer, E Araujo-Murakami, A Restrepo Correa, Z Lopez, W Delgado Santana, F Viscarra, LJ Elias, F Vasquez Martinez, R Marimon-Junior, BH Galbraith, D Sullivan, MJP Emilio, T Prestes, NCCS Barlow, J Alencar Fagundes, NC Almeida de Oliveira, E Alvarez Loayza, P Alves, LF Vieira, SA Maia, VA Aragão, LEOC Arets, EJMM Arroyo, L Bánki, O Baraloto, C Barbosa Camargo, P Barroso, J Bento da Silva, W Bonal, D Santos, ABM Brienen, RJW Brown, F Castilho, CV
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2023. 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 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Published: September 2023 Published (online): 4 September 2023 Accepted: 21 July 2023
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Ecology & Global Change (Leeds)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	15 Sep 2023 15:16
Last Modified:	26 Nov 2023 17:16
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Research
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41558-023-01776-4
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:203387

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Sensitivity of South American tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly

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