Bennett, AC;
Rodrigues de Sousa, T;
Monteagudo-Mendoza, A;
Esquivel-Muelbert, A;
Morandi, PS;
Coelho de Souza, F;
Castro, W;
... Pickavance, GC; + view all
(2023)
Sensitivity of South American tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly.
Nature Climate Change
, 13
pp. 967-974.
10.1038/s41558-023-01776-4.
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Abstract
The tropical forest carbon sink is known to be drought sensitive, but it is unclear which forests are the most vulnerable to extreme events. Forests with hotter and drier baseline conditions may be protected by prior adaptation, or more vulnerable because they operate closer to physiological limits. Here we report that forests in drier South American climates experienced the greatest impacts of the 2015–2016 El Niño, indicating greater vulnerability to extreme temperatures and drought. The long-term, ground-measured tree-by-tree responses of 123 forest plots across tropical South America show that the biomass carbon sink ceased during the event with carbon balance becoming indistinguishable from zero (−0.02 ± 0.37 Mg C ha−1 per year). However, intact tropical South American forests overall were no more sensitive to the extreme 2015–2016 El Niño than to previous less intense events, remaining a key defence against climate change as long as they are protected.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Sensitivity of South American tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41558-023-01776-4 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01776-4 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as 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. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10186344 |
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