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Remotely sensed resilience of tropical forests

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 1028–1031 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Recent work suggests that episodes of drought and heat can bring forests across climate zones to a threshold for massive tree mortality1. As complex systems approach a threshold for collapse they tend to exhibit a loss of resilience, as reflected in declining recovery rates from perturbations2. Trees may be no exception, as at the verge of drought-induced death, trees are found to be weakened in multiple ways, affecting their ability to recover from stress3,4. Here we use worldwide time series of satellite images to show that temporal autocorrelation, an indicator of slow recovery rates5, rises steeply as mean annual precipitation declines to levels known to be critical for tropical forests. This implies independent support for the idea that such forests may have a tipping point for collapse at drying conditions. Moreover, the demonstration that reduced rates of recovery (slowing down) may be detected from satellite data suggests a novel way to monitor resilience of tropical forests, as well as other ecosystems known to be vulnerable to collapse.

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Figure 1: Slowness of dynamics of intact tropical forest as a function of mean annual precipitation on different continents.
Figure 2: Distribution of tropical forest cover (top), mean annual precipitation (middle) and remotely sensed slowness (bottom) across continents.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partly funded by a Marie-Curie IRG grant within the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program to J.V. (268423, http://bfast.r-forge.r-project.org) and by the ERC-Early Warning grant and Spinoza award received by M.S. We thank Y. Liu for the global VOD AMSR-E data set (2002–2011) and support.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Jan Verbesselt & Martin Herold

  2. Department of Statistics, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck, Universitätsstrasse 15, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria

    Nikolaus Umlauf & Achim Zeileis

  3. Water Ecology and Water Management Group, Wageningen University, PO Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Marina Hirota, Egbert H. Van Nes & Marten Scheffer

  4. Department of Physics, Federal University of Santa Catarina, 88040-970 Florianópolis, Brazil

    Marina Hirota

  5. Functional Ecology Lab, University of Campinas, 13083-970 Campinas, Brazil

    Marina Hirota

  6. Resource Ecology Group, Wageningen University, PO Box 47 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Milena Holmgren

Authors
  1. Jan Verbesselt
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  3. Marina Hirota
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  4. Milena Holmgren
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  5. Egbert H. Van Nes
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  7. Achim Zeileis
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  8. Marten Scheffer
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Contributions

M.S., M.Hirota, M.Holmgren, E.H.V.N. and J.V. conceived the idea of the study; J.V., N.U. and A.Z. analysed the data; M.S., J.V., M.Herold, M.Hirota, M.Holmgren and E.H.V.N. interpreted the results; M.S. wrote the paper; all authors discussed the results and revised the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jan Verbesselt or Marten Scheffer.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Verbesselt, J., Umlauf, N., Hirota, M. et al. Remotely sensed resilience of tropical forests. Nature Clim Change 6, 1028–1031 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3108

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