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Our paper on how and why Amazon trees die have just been published in @NatureComms https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18996-3#Ack1
Here is what we found
@ForestPlots @TreeMort_ERC @BIFoRUoB @LES_UniBham @GeogBham @SoGLeeds (1/8)
Here is what we found
@ForestPlots @TreeMort_ERC @BIFoRUoB @LES_UniBham @GeogBham @SoGLeeds (1/8)
Tree mortality has been increasing in the Amazon ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283) - we wanted to know why. But to understand changes we need to understand the baseline. For that we assessed the mode of death and risk factors of tree death across the Amazon basin. (2/8)
Previous studies show that high tree mortality rates were associated with wind disturbance. We show that this is not necessarily the case: high mortality can also be observed in systems where wind is not the major cause of tree death, such as the South of the Amazon. (3/8)
Species matter! Species growth rate was the most important risk factor of tree death. Species that grow faster also die younger. If climate change is selecting for fast pioneer species ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.14413) the future Amazon might be able to hold less carbon (4/8)
Growth rates are more important than size! Trees growing slower had higher chance of death and the risk related to growth was greater than the risk related to tree size (5/8)
Drought tolerance is an important risk factor in the South of the Amazon, but not in other regions. This indicates that the extremely hot and dry forests of the South where climate has been changing faster might be living beyond their physiological limits (6/8)
To study tree mortality, we need a lot of data = several visits to the same site for years. This is not possible without a large collaborative effort and long-term scientific funding, without which we cannot understand the trajectory of the Amazon forest (7/8)
This work was funded by @NERCscience @ERC_Research @CNPq_Oficial @royalsociety and so many other research councils across South America (8/8).
