File: Download
Year of Publication: 2018
Author(s): Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert
Journal: Global Change Biology
The attached paper, led by Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert and involving more than 100 researchers, has important conclusions about climatic change and the Amazon rainforest:
- Amazon droughts are increasing in frequency and intensity, possibly in response to human-caused climatic change.
- But tree communities aren’t keeping up with the rapid changes: moisture-adapted species are dying out and not being replaced by drought-tolerant species.
- In addition, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – a direct result of human greenhouse gas emissions – are driving compositional changes in the forest.
- Echoing our earlier findings in Amazonia (Laurance et al. 2004, Nature), big canopy trees are increasingly dominating the forest, whereas smaller tree species are declining in abundance.
- The big trees, having abundant sunlight, are able to exploit rising carbon dioxide to photosynthesize and grow more rapidly. This gives them a competitive edge over smaller tree species, which are becoming rarer.
- Animals specialized for pollinating and feeding on different tree species will also be affected, and thus the entire Amazon ecosystem may be altered by climatic change.