Tropical ecology articles within Nature Geoscience

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• Article
  15 May 2024 | Open Access

  Response of tropical forest productivity to seasonal drought mediated by potassium and phosphorus availability

  The resilience of tropical forest ecosystems to seasonal drought is linked to terrestrial potassium and phosphorus availability, according to a nutrient addition experiment in a moist forest in Uganda.

  • Raphael Manu
  • , Najeeb Al-Amin Iddris
  •  & Edzo Veldkamp

• Article
  11 March 2024 | Open Access

  Late Pleistocene emergence of an anthropogenic fire regime in Australia’s tropical savannahs

  A shift towards more-frequent, less-intense fires in Australia began about 11,000 years ago due to management by Indigenous societies, according to charcoal and stable polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon records extending back 150,000 years.

  • Michael I. Bird
  • , Michael Brand
  •  & Corey J. A. Bradshaw

• Article | 21 July 2022

  Mapping peat thickness and carbon stocks of the central Congo Basin using field data

  Field surveys suggest peatlands in the central Congo Basin are globally significant carbon stocks, storing approximately 28% of the world’s tropical peat carbon.

  • Bart Crezee
  • , Greta C. Dargie
  •  & Simon L. Lewis

• Article | 31 March 2022

  Tropical tree growth driven by dry-season climate variability

  Dry-season climate variability is a primary driver of tropical tree growth, according to observations from a pantropical tree-ring network.

  • Pieter A. Zuidema
  • , Flurin Babst
  •  & Zhe-Kun Zhou

• Article | 29 July 2021

  Dry corridors opened by fire and low CO₂ in Amazonian rainforest during the Last Glacial Maximum

  Lower CO₂ and more-frequent fires may have supported grassland expansion in the Amazon during the Last Glacial Maximum, according to vegetation modelling using a range of boundary conditions tested against existing pollen records.

  • Hiromitsu Sato
  • , Douglas I. Kelley
  •  & Iain Colin Prentice

• Article | 14 December 2020

  Deforestation-induced warming over tropical mountain regions regulated by elevation

  Deforestation causes elevation-dependent warming over tropical mountain regions, according to high-resolution climate simulations.

  • Zhenzhong Zeng
  • , Dashan Wang
  •  & Eric F. Wood

• Article | 05 August 2019

  Amazon forest response to CO₂ fertilization dependent on plant phosphorus acquisition

  Phosphorus limitation can significantly reduce the response of the Amazon forest to CO₂ fertilization, according to ecosystem-model ensemble simulations of a free-air CO₂ enrichment experiment.

  • Katrin Fleischer
  • , Anja Rammig
  •  & David M. Lapola

• Article | 15 July 2019

  Carbon stocks in central African forests enhanced by elephant disturbance

  Elephant disturbance favours the emergence of larger trees with higher wood density, and thereby increases the aboveground biomass in central African forests by up to 60 t ha^–1, according to simulations with the Ecosystem Demography model.

  • Fabio Berzaghi
  • , Marcos Longo
  •  & Christopher E. Doughty

• Article | 25 February 2019

  Higher resilience to climatic disturbances in tropical vegetation exposed to more variable rainfall

  Tropical forests and savannah are more resilient to climate disturbances when they have been exposed to higher rainfall variability in the long-term past, finds an analysis of Brazilian rainfall and tree-cover observations.

  • Catrin Ciemer
  • , Niklas Boers
  •  & Ricarda Winkelmann

• Article | 20 December 2018

  Mangrove canopy height globally related to precipitation, temperature and cyclone frequency

  Mangrove canopy height varies strongly around the globe in response to climatic factors, according to a global analysis of remote sensing and field data.

  • Marc Simard
  • , Lola Fatoyinbo
  •  & Tom Van der Stocken

• Letter | 09 March 2015

  Photosynthetic seasonality of global tropical forests constrained by hydroclimate

  Droughts can cause dry-season productivity to decline in tropical forests. This decline occurs when precipitation is below 2,000 mm yr⁻¹, resulting in insufficient subsurface water storage to maintain constant production through the dry season.

  • Kaiyu Guan
  • , Ming Pan
  •  & Alexei I. Lyapustin

• Letter | 15 December 2014

  No growth stimulation of tropical trees by 150 years of CO₂ fertilization but water-use efficiency increased

  Increasing CO₂ concentrations are expected to increase plant growth and water efficiency. Tree-ring data covering 150 years from tropical forests show that water-use efficiency has increased with CO₂ concentrations but tree growth has not.

  • Peter van der Sleen
  • , Peter Groenendijk
  •  & Pieter A. Zuidema

• Letter | 12 August 2012

  Continuous flux of dissolved black carbon from a vanished tropical forest biome

  Before it was destroyed by slash and burn practices, Brazil’s Atlantic Forest was one of the largest tropical forest biomes on Earth. Measurements from a river draining the region suggest that significant quantities of black carbon generated by the burning continue to be exported from the former forest.

  • Thorsten Dittmar
  • , Carlos Eduardo de Rezende
  •  & Marcelo Correa Bernardes