Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J., Díaz, S., Rifai, S.W. et al. (131 more authors) (2025) Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change. Science, 387 (6738). eadl5414. ISSN 0036-8075
Abstract
Understanding the capacity of forests to adapt to climate change is of pivotal importance for conservation science, yet this is still widely unknown. This knowledge gap is particularly acute in high-biodiversity tropical forests. Here, we examined how tropical forests of the Americas have shifted community trait composition in recent decades as a response to changes in climate. Based on historical trait-climate relationships, we found that, overall, the studied functional traits show shifts of less than 8% of what would be expected given the observed changes in climate. However, the recruit assemblage shows shifts of 21% relative to climate change expectation. The most diverse forests on Earth are changing in functional trait composition but at a rate that is fundamentally insufficient to track climate change.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an author produced version of an article published in Science, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/S011811/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 04 Mar 2025 14:13 |
Last Modified: | 14 Mar 2025 11:52 |
Published Version: | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl541... |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | AAAS |
Identification Number: | 10.1126/science.adl5414 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:223800 |