Phillips, OL orcid.org/0000-0002-8993-6168, Sullivan, MJP orcid.org/0000-0002-5955-0483, Baker, TR et al. (3 more authors) (2019) Species Matter: Wood Density Influences Tropical Forest Biomass at Multiple Scales. Surveys in Geophysics, 40 (4). pp. 913-935. ISSN 0169-3298
Abstract
The mass of carbon contained in trees is governed by the volume and density of their wood. This represents a challenge to most remote sensing technologies, which typically detect surface structure and parameters related to wood volume but not to its density. Since wood density is largely determined by taxonomic identity this challenge is greatest in tropical forests where there are tens of thousands of tree species. Here, using pan-tropical literature and new analyses in Amazonia with plots with reliable identifications we assess the impact that species-related variation in wood density has on biomass estimates of mature tropical forests. We find impacts of species on forest biomass due to wood density at all scales from the individual tree up to the whole biome: variation in tree species composition regulates how much carbon forests can store. Even local differences in composition can cause variation in forest biomass and carbon density of 20% between subtly different local forest types, while additional large-scale floristic variation leads to variation in mean wood density of 10–30% across Amazonia and the tropics. Further, because species composition varies at all scales and even vertically within a stand, our analysis shows that bias and uncertainty always result if individual identity is ignored. Since sufficient inventory-based evidence based on botanical identification now exists to show that species composition matters biome-wide for biomass, we here assemble and provide mean basal-area-weighted wood density values for different forests across the lowand tropical biome. These range widely, from 0.467 to 0.728 g cm−3 with a pan-tropical mean of 0.619 g cm−3. Our analysis shows that mapping tropical ecosystem carbon always benefits from locally validated measurement of tree-by-tree botanical identity combined with tree-by-tree measurement of dimensions. Therefore whenever possible, efforts to map and monitor tropical forest carbon using remote sensing techniques should be combined with tree-level measurement of species identity by botanists working in inventory plots.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided 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. |
Keywords: | Amazon; Tropical forests; Species; Identity; Carbon; Biomass; Dynamics |
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 282664 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 24 May 2019 15:36 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 21:50 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10712-019-09540-0 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:146521 |
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