Compositional response of Amazon forests to climate change

| November 10, 2018 | Leave a Comment

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:

  1. Amazon droughts are increasing in frequency and intensity, possibly in response to human-caused climatic change.
  2. 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.
  3. In addition, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – a direct result of human greenhouse gas emissions – are driving compositional changes in the forest.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
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