Depoortere, P., Bauman, D., Fayolle, A. et al. (238 more authors) (2026) Region-specific forest structure pathways reveal climate effects on old-growth tropical forest biomass. Scientific Reports, 16. 27381. ISSN: 2045-2322
Abstract
Old-growth tropical forests store vast amounts of carbon in their aboveground biomass (AGB), yet the relative roles of abiotic factors such as climate, soil, and topography in governing its spatial distribution remain poorly understood. In particular, the degree to which climate acts on AGB through forest structure is still poorly quantified at the pantropical scale. Using a pantropical dataset of more than 2,000 old-growth forest plots and a structure-explicit framework, we assess how climate influences AGB through its effects on four structural attributes: basal area, mean diameter, stem density, and basal area-weighted wood density. We find that climate shapes AGB primarily through its effects on forest structure. However, structural attributes respond to climate in opposite directions, so climate’s net effect on AGB largely cancels out, and no clear climate-AGB relationship emerges across tropical regions. Moreover, only wood density responds consistently, decreasing with annual precipitation and increasing with precipitation seasonality, whereas all other attributes respond to climate differently from one region to another. This geographical variation further obscures any global climatic signal on AGB and points to the role of biogeographic history in shaping forest structure. Our findings highlight the central role of the climate-structure nexus in explaining AGB variation, and call for structure-explicit models to improve carbon stock predictions and inform climate adaptation strategies.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Authors/Creators: |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2026 . This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Aboveground biomass, Climatic drivers, Structural attributes, Old-growth tropical forests, Structure-explicit pathway modelling, Pantropical |
| 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, RCUK Shared Services Centre Ltd NE/F005806/1 EU - European Union **KRISTAL** EXT 448221 Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation N/A NERC, RCUK Shared Services Centre Ltd NE/X014347/1 |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Sep 2026 11:25 |
| Last Modified: | 14 Sep 2026 11:25 |
| Status: | Published |
| Publisher: | Nature Research |
| Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41598-026-61888-7 |
| Related URLs: | |
| Sustainable Development Goals: | |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:245317 |
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Licence: CC-BY 4.0


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