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Resilience of Amazon forests emerges from plant trait diversity

Abstract

Climate change threatens ecosystems worldwide, yet their potential future resilience remains largely unquantified1. In recent years many studies have shown that biodiversity, and in particular functional diversity, can enhance ecosystem resilience by providing a higher response diversity2,3,4,5. So far these insights have been mostly neglected in large-scale projections of ecosystem responses to climate change6. Here we show that plant trait diversity, as a key component of functional diversity, can have a strikingly positive effect on the Amazon forests’ biomass under future climate change. Using a terrestrial biogeochemical model that simulates diverse forest communities on the basis of individual tree growth7, we show that plant trait diversity may enable the Amazon forests to adjust to new climate conditions via a process of ecological sorting, protecting the Amazon’s carbon sink function. Therefore, plant trait diversity, and biodiversity in general, should be considered in large-scale ecosystem projections and be included as an integral part of climate change research and policy.

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Figure 1: Simulated rainforest biomass under climate change and different plant trait diversity.
Figure 2: Climate-change-induced plant trait shifts lead to biomass recovery.
Figure 3: Forest height structure recovers with biomass.
Figure 4: Effect of plant trait diversity on biomass resilience of the Amazon basin.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank H. J. Schellnhuber, W. Lucht, S. Rahmstorf, A. Rammig, F. Langerwisch, A. Schlums (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) and Ü. Niinemets (Estonian University of Life Sciences) for helpful comments that improved the manuscript. The research leading to these results has received partial funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 283093—The Role Of Biodiversity In climate change mitigatioN (ROBIN). J.H. acknowledges funding from the Helmholtz Alliance ‘Remote Sensing and Earth System Dynamics’. The study has been supported by the TRY initiative on plant traits (http://www.try-db.org). The TRY initiative and database is hosted, developed and maintained by J. Kattge and G. Bönisch (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany). TRY is/has been supported by DIVERSITAS, IGBP, the Global Land Project, the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) through its program QUEST (Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System), the French Foundation for Biodiversity Research (FRB), and GIS ‘Climat, Environnement et Société’ France.

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B.S., W.v.B., A.B., K.T., M.P.-C. and L.P. conceived the experiments, B.S. and W.v.B. performed the experiments and analysed the data, J.H. contributed material/analysis tools. B.S., W.v.B., A.B., K.T., M.P.-C., L.P. and J.J. co-wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Boris Sakschewski.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Sakschewski, B., von Bloh, W., Boit, A. et al. Resilience of Amazon forests emerges from plant trait diversity. Nature Clim Change 6, 1032–1036 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3109

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