Journal
GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY
Volume 19, Issue 11, Pages 3423-3434Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/gcb.12312
Keywords
canopy; Costa Rica; drought; global change; La Selva; rainforest
Funding
- University of Maryland, College Park
- US DOE
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- TEAM project of Conservation International
- NSF [NSF/LTREB 0841872]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [0841872] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Tropical rainforests have experienced episodes of severe heat and drought in recent decades, and climate models project a warmer and potentially drier tropical climate over this century. However, likely responses of tropical rainforests are poorly understood due to a lack of frequent long-term measurements of forest structure and dynamics. We analyzed a 12-year record (1999-2010) of 47817 annual measurements of canopy height to characterize the response of an old-growth Neotropical rainforest to the severe heat and drought associated with the 1997-1998 El Nino. Well-drained soils on slopes and plateaus experienced a threefold increase in the fraction of the landscape in gaps (2m) and a reduction in the fraction in high canopy (>15m) causing distributions of canopy height to depart from equilibrium for a period of 2-3years. In contrast, forests on low-lying alluvial terraces remained in equilibrium and were nearly half as likely to experience upper canopy (>15m) disturbance over the 12years of observation. Variation in forest response across topographic positions suggests that tropical rainforests are more sensitive to moisture deficits than high temperature and that topography likely structures landscape-level variation in the severity of drought impacts.
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