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FOREST ECOLOGY

Tree height matters

Nature Geoscience volume 11, pages 390–391 (2018)Cite this article

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Tall trees are more resilient to drought than short trees, suggests a comparison of the sensitivity of photosynthesis to soil moisture in Amazon forests.

Amazon forests help to slow down the rate of carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere. The high photosynthetic rates of these forests have contributed to the assimilation of 0.4 Pg of carbon in most years over the past few decades1. The forests harvest vast amounts of sunlight to fix the absorbed carbon that eventually forms tree leaves, trunks and roots2. This ability to convert solar radiation into chemical energy sustains complex ecosystem processes and one of the most diverse forests on Earth. Photosynthesis across Amazon primary forests exhibits broad spatial and temporal variations. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Giardina et al.3 report that forest height controls much of the photosynthetic variation in response to drought in Amazon forests. They find that photosynthesis of forests above 30 m in height is three times less sensitive to variations in precipitation than that in forests with heights below 20 m.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of water uptake and loss in tall and short trees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, MA, USA

    Paulo Brando

  2. Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM), SHIN, Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil

    Paulo Brando

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  1. Paulo Brando
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Correspondence to Paulo Brando.

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Brando, P. Tree height matters. Nature Geosci 11, 390–391 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0147-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0147-z

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