| 1. |
- Correa, D. F., et al.
(författare)
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Geographic patterns of tree dispersal modes in Amazonia and their ecological correlates
- 2023
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Ingår i: Global Ecology and Biogeography. - : Wiley. - 1466-822X .- 1466-8238. ; 32:1, s. 49-69
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Aim To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of these dispersal modes could be explained by the availability of dispersal agents (disperser-availability hypothesis) and/or the availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits (resource-availability hypothesis). Time period Tree-inventory plots established between 1934 and 2019. Major taxa studied Trees with a diameter at breast height (DBH) >= 9.55 cm. Location Amazonia, here defined as the lowland rain forests of the Amazon River basin and the Guiana Shield. Methods We assigned dispersal modes to a total of 5433 species and morphospecies within 1877 tree-inventory plots across terra-firme, seasonally flooded, and permanently flooded forests. We investigated geographic patterns in the proportional abundance of dispersal modes. We performed an abundance-weighted mean pairwise distance (MPD) test and fit generalized linear models (GLMs) to explain the geographic distribution of dispersal modes. Results Anemochory was significantly, positively associated with mean annual wind speed, and hydrochory was significantly higher in flooded forests. Dispersal modes did not consistently show significant associations with the availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits. A lower dissimilarity in dispersal modes, resulting from a higher dominance of endozoochory, occurred in terra-firme forests (excluding podzols) compared to flooded forests. Main conclusions The disperser-availability hypothesis was well supported for abiotic dispersal modes (anemochory and hydrochory). The availability of resources for constructing zoochorous fruits seems an unlikely explanation for the distribution of dispersal modes in Amazonia. The association between frugivores and the proportional abundance of zoochory requires further research, as tree recruitment not only depends on dispersal vectors but also on conditions that favour or limit seedling recruitment across forest types.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Davies, Stuart J., et al.
(författare)
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ForestGEO: Understanding forest diversity and dynamics through a global observatory network
- 2021
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Ingår i: Biological Conservation. - : Elsevier BV. - 0006-3207. ; 253
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- ForestGEO is a network of scientists and long-term forest dynamics plots (FDPs) spanning the Earth's major forest types. ForestGEO's mission is to advance understanding of the diversity and dynamics of forests and to strengthen global capacity for forest science research. ForestGEO is unique among forest plot networks in its large-scale plot dimensions, censusing of all stems ≥1 cm in diameter, inclusion of tropical, temperate and boreal forests, and investigation of additional biotic (e.g., arthropods) and abiotic (e.g., soils) drivers, which together provide a holistic view of forest functioning. The 71 FDPs in 27 countries include approximately 7.33 million living trees and about 12,000 species, representing 20% of the world's known tree diversity. With >1300 published papers, ForestGEO researchers have made significant contributions in two fundamental areas: species coexistence and diversity, and ecosystem functioning. Specifically, defining the major biotic and abiotic controls on the distribution and coexistence of species and functional types and on variation in species' demography has led to improved understanding of how the multiple dimensions of forest diversity are structured across space and time and how this diversity relates to the processes controlling the role of forests in the Earth system. Nevertheless, knowledge gaps remain that impede our ability to predict how forest diversity and function will respond to climate change and other stressors. Meeting these global research challenges requires major advances in standardizing taxonomy of tropical species, resolving the main drivers of forest dynamics, and integrating plot-based ground and remote sensing observations to scale up estimates of forest diversity and function, coupled with improved predictive models. However, they cannot be met without greater financial commitment to sustain the long-term research of ForestGEO and other forest plot networks, greatly expanded scientific capacity across the world's forested nations, and increased collaboration and integration among research networks and disciplines addressing forest science.
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| 4. |
- Luyssaert, S., et al.
(författare)
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CO2 balance of boreal, temperate, and tropical forests derived from a global database
- 2007
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Ingår i: Global Change Biology. - : Wiley. - 1354-1013 .- 1365-2486. ; 13:12, s. 2509-2537
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Terrestrial ecosystems sequester 2.1 Pg of atmospheric carbon annually. A large amount of the terrestrial sink is realized by forests. However, considerable uncertainties remain regarding the fate of this carbon over both short and long timescales. Relevant data to address these uncertainties are being collected at many sites around the world, but syntheses of these data are still sparse. To facilitate future synthesis activities, we have assembled a comprehensive global database for forest ecosystems, which includes carbon budget variables (fluxes and stocks), ecosystem traits (e.g. leaf area index, age), as well as ancillary site information such as management regime, climate, and soil characteristics. This publicly available database can be used to quantify global, regional or biome-specific carbon budgets; to re-examine established relationships; to test emerging hypotheses about ecosystem functioning [e.g. a constant net ecosystem production (NEP) to gross primary production (GPP) ratio]; and as benchmarks for model evaluations. In this paper, we present the first analysis of this database. We discuss the climatic influences on GPP, net primary production (NPP) and NEP and present the CO2 balances for boreal, temperate, and tropical forest biomes based on micrometeorological, ecophysiological, and biometric flux and inventory estimates. Globally, GPP of forests benefited from higher temperatures and precipitation whereas NPP saturated above either a threshold of 1500 mm precipitation or a mean annual temperature of 10 degrees C. The global pattern in NEP was insensitive to climate and is hypothesized to be mainly determined by nonclimatic conditions such as successional stage, management, site history, and site disturbance. In all biomes, closing the CO2 balance required the introduction of substantial biome-specific closure terms. Nonclosure was taken as an indication that respiratory processes, advection, and non-CO2 carbon fluxes are not presently being adequately accounted for.
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| 5. |
- Sikora, M., et al.
(författare)
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The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene
- 2019
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 570:7760
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Northeastern Siberia has been inhabited by humans for more than 40,000 years but its deep population history remains poorly understood. Here we investigate the late Pleistocene population history of northeastern Siberia through analyses of 34 newly recovered ancient genomes that date to between 31,000 and 600 years ago. We document complex population dynamics during this period, including at least three major migration events: an initial peopling by a previously unknown Palaeolithic population of 'Ancient North Siberians' who are distantly related to early West Eurasian hunter-gatherers; the arrival of East Asian-related peoples, which gave rise to 'Ancient Palaeo-Siberians' who are closely related to contemporary communities from far-northeastern Siberia (such as the Koryaks), as well as Native Americans; and a Holocene migration of other East Asian-related peoples, who we name 'Neo-Siberians', and from whom many contemporary Siberians are descended. Each of these population expansions largely replaced the earlier inhabitants, and ultimately generated the mosaic genetic make-up of contemporary peoples who inhabit a vast area across northern Eurasia and the Americas.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Cuni-Sanchez, Aida, et al.
(författare)
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High aboveground carbon stock of African tropical montane forests
- 2021
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 596:7873, s. 536-542
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Tropical forests store 40–50per cent of terrestrial vegetation carbon. However, spatial variations in aboveground live tree biomass carbon (AGC) stocks remain poorly understood, in particular in tropical montane forests. Owing to climatic and soil changes with increasing elevation, AGC stocks are lower in tropical montane forests compared with lowland forests. Here we assemble and analyse a dataset of structurally intact old-growth forests (AfriMont) spanning 44 montane sites in 12 African countries. We find that montane sites in the AfriMont plot network have a mean AGC stock of 149.4megagrams of carbon per hectare (95% confidence interval 137.1–164.2), which is comparable to lowland forests in the African Tropical Rainforest Observation Network4 and about 70per cent and 32per cent higher than averages from plot networks in montane and lowland forests in the Neotropics, respectively. Notably, our results are two-thirds higher than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change default values for these forests in Africa8. We find that the low stem density and high abundance of large trees of African lowland forests is mirrored in the montane forests sampled. This carbon store is endangered: we estimate that 0.8 million hectares of old-growth African montane forest have been lost since 2000. We provide country-specific montane forest AGC stock estimates modelled from our plot network to helpto guide forest conservation and reforestation interventions. Our findings highlight the need for conserving these biodiverse and carbon-rich ecosystems.
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| 8. |
- Doughty, Christopher E., et al.
(författare)
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Drought impact on forest carbon dynamics and fluxes in Amazonia
- 2015
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 519:7541, s. 78-140
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In 2005 and 2010 the Amazon basin experienced two strong droughts', driven by shifts in the tropical hydrological regime(2) possibly associated with global climate change(3), as predicted by some global models'. Tree mortality increased after the 2005 drought(4), and regional atmospheric inversion modelling showed basin-wide decreases in CO2 uptake in 2010 compared with 2011 (ref. 5). But the response of tropical forest carbon cycling to these droughts is not fully understood and there has been no detailed multi-site investigation in situ. Here we use several years of data from a network of thirteen 1-ha forest plots spread throughout South America, where each component of net primary production (NPP), autotrophic respiration and heterotrophic respiration is measured separately, to develop a better mechanistic understanding of the impact of the 2010 drought on the Amazon forest. We find that total NPP remained constant throughout the drought. However, towards the end of the drought, autotrophic respiration, especially in roots and stems, declined significantly compared with measurements in 2009 made in the absence of drought, with extended decreases in autotrophic respiration in the three driest plots. In the year after the drought, total NPP remained constant but the allocation of carbon shifted towards canopy NPP and away from fine-root NPP. Both leaf-level and plot-level measurements indicate that severe drought suppresses photosynthesis. Scaling these measurements to the entire Amazon basin with rainfall data, we estimate that drought suppressed Amazon-wide photosynthesis in 2010 by 0.38 petagrams of carbon (0.23-0.53 petagrams of carbon). Overall, we find that during this drought, instead of reducing total NPP, trees prioritized growth by reducing autotrophic respiration that was unrelated to growth. This suggests that trees decrease investment in tissue maintenance and defence, in line with eco-evolutionary theories that trees are competitively disadvantaged in the absence of growth(6). We propose that weakened maintenance and defence investment may, in turn, cause the increase in post-drought tree mortality observed at our plots.
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| 9. |
- Doughty, Christopher E., et al.
(författare)
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Source and sink carbon dynamics and carbon allocation in the Amazon basin
- 2015
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Ingår i: Global Biogeochemical Cycles. - 0886-6236. ; 29:5, s. 645-655
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Changes to the carbon cycle in tropical forests could affect global climate, but predicting such changes has been previously limited by lack of field-based data. Here we show seasonal cycles of the complete carbon cycle for 14, 1ha intensive carbon cycling plots which we separate into three regions: humid lowland, highlands, and dry lowlands. Our data highlight three trends: (1) there is differing seasonality of total net primary productivity (NPP) with the highlands and dry lowlands peaking in the dry season and the humid lowland sites peaking in the wet season, (2) seasonal reductions in wood NPP are not driven by reductions in total NPP but by carbon during the dry season being preferentially allocated toward either roots or canopy NPP, and (3) there is a temporal decoupling between total photosynthesis and total carbon usage (plant carbon expenditure). This decoupling indicates the presence of nonstructural carbohydrates which may allow growth and carbon to be allocated when it is most ecologically beneficial rather than when it is most environmentally available.
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| 10. |
- Hirons, M., et al.
(författare)
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Illegality and inequity in Ghana's cocoa-forest landscape : How formalization can undermine farmers control and benefits from trees on their farms
- 2018
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Ingår i: Land Use Policy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0264-8377. ; 76, s. 405-413
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Schemes to promote sustainable forest management have increasingly focused on addressing widespread informalities in timber production, based on the presumed links between formalisation, the maintenance of forest cover and local welfare. This trend is typified by the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative and associated Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA) aimed at eradicating the trade of illegal wood between partner countries and the EU. Yet there is concern that such initiatives might have detrimental impacts on the largely informal rights of local resource users. In order to inform the formalisation agenda, more detailed analysis of the operation of local rights, and how they might be affected by particular schemes is required.This paper focuses on Ghana as a country with a largely informal wood sector that has signed a VPA with the EU for the express purpose of rapid formalisation. Our analysis is guided by a framework for assessing which types of rights might be transformed by particular approaches to formalisation and the subsequent effect this might have on forests and people in particular local contexts. We then apply this framework to an in-depth local case study of on-farm timber governance within a cocoa-forest landscape in Ghana's Central Region to examine how the operation of formal and informal and substantive and procedural rights shape who controls, and benefits from, on-farm timber production. We then analyse the content of the VPA in light of these local realities and assess its potential impacts.Our findings highlight how the substantive rights the state grants to companies are presumed to be balanced with the granting of procedural rights to farmers via the mechanisms of right of refusal to harvest on-farm timber, compensation for damage to cocoa crops and the negotiation of community-level Social Responsibility Agreements with private companies. Yet a comparison of these formal rights with farmers' existing informal rights reveals that farmers' control and access to benefits from trees on their farms are notably higher in the 'illegal' chainsaw dominated informal sector than in the 'legal' state-based system. Farmers choose to maintain trees on farms both to shade cocoa and in anticipation of benefits from their informal sale. The VPA, however, aims to eradicate all informal on-farm timber production and thus threatens existing local rights and benefit capture while diminishing incentives to maintain trees on farm. Rather than further criminalising local systems of timber governance, the maintenance of tree cover and local benefit-sharing would be better served by 1) phasing out timber concessions on farmland, 2) abandoning the distinction between planted and native trees on farms and, 3) understanding, recognizing and respecting the existing informal rights of farmers, traditional authorities and chainsaw loggers to negotiate among themselves patterns of access and control of on-farm trees and timber. In general, the case study challenges the assertion that formalisation is requisite for sustainable forest management and mandates a more nuanced and contextually informed assessment of the assumed costs and benefits associated with particular forms of legal and policy reform.
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| 11. |
- Hirons, M., et al.
(författare)
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Pursuing climate resilient coffee in Ethiopia – A critical review
- 2018
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185. ; 91, s. 108-116
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper provides a multi-scalar examination of the Ethiopian coffee sector and its pursuit of climate resilience. Concern is growing about the potential impact of climate change on Arabica coffee in Ethiopia and the 25 million livelihoods it supports. Arabica coffee has a relatively narrow envelope of climatic suitability and recent studies suggest that the area of bioclimatically suitable space for the species in its native Ethiopia could decline dramatically in the coming decades. We adopt a critical perspective on resilience that reflects on the situated nature of the ecology/science of coffee and climate change and the operation of social, economic, and discursive power across scales, paying particular attention to the differentiated impacts of climate change and associated resilience strategies. This analysis begins by reviewing Ethiopia's Climate Resilient Green Economy strategy and argues that the current lack of attention to coffee is inappropriate considering the coffee sector's vulnerability to climate change, economic importance and association with forests. The paper then examines the contemporary coffee sector which provides the context for reflecting on three potential responses to the threat climate change poses; a spatial response from farmers, adaptive farm management responses such as changing shade levels and the development of the country's genetic resources to cultivate improved varieties. The analysis explores the disconnect between the interventions emerging from national and international institutions and the local context. The multi-scale approach highlights the presence of complex normative trade-offs associated with pursing climate resilience strategies and reinforces the importance of appreciating the dynamics which influence decision-making in the country.
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| 12. |
- Hirons, M., et al.
(författare)
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Understanding climate resilience in Ghanaian cocoa communities – Advancing a biocultural perspective
- 2018
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Ingår i: Journal of Rural Studies. - : Elsevier BV. - 0743-0167. ; 63, s. 120-129
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing conceptual development and practical pursuit of resilience, the ability to absorb and respond to shocks, in an agricultural and climate change context. It builds on work that aims to dissolve the nature-society dualism and naturalisation of power relations inherent in systems thinking by developing and extending a framework originally conceived to integrate research on biological and cultural diversity. The resultant ‘biocultural’ framework examines livelihood practices, institutions, knowledge and beliefs and is applied to a case study of cocoa communities in Ghana's Central Region. Drawing on data collected over three years spanning an El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) related drought event, the analysis demonstrates the utility of an expanded conception of resilience that links livelihood practices, which define the impact and response to droughts, with the constituent knowledge, institutions and beliefs that shape those practices. The study focuses on two key factors that underpin cocoa farmers' resilience to climate shocks: access to wetlands and access to credit. We argue that particular characteristics of livelihood practices, knowledge, belief and institutions, and their interactions, can be both resilience enhancing and undermining, when viewed at different spatial, temporal and social scales. Although such contradictions present challenges to policy-makers engaging with climate resilience, the analysis provides a clearer diagnoses of key challenges to the resilience of agricultural systems and insights into where policy interventions might be most effective.
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| 13. |
- Hirons, M., et al.
(författare)
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Understanding Poverty in Cash-crop Agro-forestry Systems : Evidence from Ghana and Ethiopia
- 2018
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Ingår i: Ecological Economics. - : Elsevier BV. - 0921-8009. ; 154, s. 31-41
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper examines the linkages between cash-crop income and other dimensions of poverty to interrogate assumptions regarding the relationship between agricultural income and poverty alleviation. The analysis treats poverty as a multi-dimensional and socially disaggregated phenomenon. The paper employs a mixed methods approach to case studies of Ghana and Ethiopia to explore two critical issues. First, how income from cash crops is linked with other dimensions of poverty. Second, how income and land are socially disaggregated. The paper then draws on qualitative data to critically reflect on how poverty is understood within studied communities. The results show that some, but not all, indicators of poverty vary across income quartiles and that significant differences exist across social groups. The analysis suggests that although cash crops are essential, focusing on increasing income from cash crops will not necessarily have a predictable or progressive impact on wellbeing. Furthermore, the analysis highlights how contextual factors, such as the provision of communal services, the nature of land holdings and the quality of local governance mediate the potential poverty alleviating outcomes of income increases. Future development of sustainable intensification strategies should focus on the prevalence of trade-offs and the fundamental social relations underpinning poverty dynamics.
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| 14. |
- Hülsmann, Lisa, et al.
(författare)
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Latitudinal patterns in stabilizing density dependence of forest communities
- 2024
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Ingår i: Nature. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 627, s. 564-571
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Numerous studies have shown reduced performance in plants that are surrounded by neighbours of the same species1,2, a phenomenon known as conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD)3. A long-held ecological hypothesis posits that CNDD is more pronounced in tropical than in temperate forests4,5, which increases community stabilization, species coexistence and the diversity of local tree species6,7. Previous analyses supporting such a latitudinal gradient in CNDD8,9 have suffered from methodological limitations related to the use of static data10–12. Here we present a comprehensive assessment of latitudinal CNDD patterns using dynamic mortality data to estimate species-site-specific CNDD across 23 sites. Averaged across species, we found that stabilizing CNDD was present at all except one site, but that average stabilizingCNDD was not stronger toward the tropics. However, in tropical tree communities, rare and intermediate abundant species experienced stronger stabilizing CNDD than did common species. This pattern was absent in temperate forests, which suggests that CNDD influences species abundances more strongly in tropical forests than it does in temperate ones13. We also found that interspecific variation in CNDD, which might attenuate its stabilizing effect on species diversity14,15, was high but not significantly different across latitudes. Although the consequences of these patterns for latitudinal diversity gradients are difficult to evaluate, we speculate that a more effective regulation of population abundances could translate into greater stabilization of tropical tree communities and thus contribute to the high local diversity of tropical forests.
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| 15. |
- Jónsdóttir, I. S., et al.
(författare)
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Intraspecific trait variability is a key feature underlying high Arctic plant community resistance to climate warming
- 2022
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Ingår i: Ecological Monographs. - : Wiley. - 0012-9615 .- 1557-7015.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the high Arctic, plant community species composition generally responds slowly to climate warming, whereas less is known about the community functional trait responses and consequences for ecosystem functioning. Slow species turnover and large distribution ranges of many Arctic plant species suggest a significant role of intraspecific trait variability in functional responses to climate change. Here, we compare taxonomic and functional community compositional responses to a long-term (17years) warming experiment in Svalbard, replicated across three major high Arctic habitats shaped by topography and contrasting snow regimes. We observed taxonomic compositional changes in all plant communities over time. Still, responses to experimental warming were minor and most pronounced in the drier habitats with relatively early snowmelt timing and long growing seasons (Cassiope and Dryas heaths). The habitats were clearly separated in functional trait space, defined by twelve size- and leaf economics-related traits, primarily due to interspecific trait variation. Functional traits also responded to experimental warming, most prominently in the Dryas heath and mostly due to intraspecific trait variation. Leaf area and leaf mass increased, and leaf δ15N decreased in response to the warming treatment. Intraspecific trait variability ranged between 30% and 71% of the total trait variation, reflecting functional resilience of those communities, dominated by long-lived plants, due to either phenotypic plasticity or genotypic variation that most likely underlies the observed resistance of high Arctic vegetation to climate warming. We further explored the consequences of trait variability for ecosystem functioning by measuring peak season CO2 fluxes. Together, environmental, taxonomic, and functional trait variables explained a large proportion of the variation in net ecosystem exchange (NEE), which increased when intraspecific trait variation was accounted for. In contrast, even though ecosystem respiration and gross ecosystem production both increased in response to warming across habitats, they were mainly driven by the direct kinetic impacts of temperature on plant physiology and biochemical processes. Our study shows that long-term experimental warming has a modest but significant effect on plant community functional trait composition and suggests that intraspecific trait variability is a key feature underlying high Arctic ecosystem resistance to climate warming.
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| 16. |
- Leite, Melina de Souza, et al.
(författare)
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Major axes of variation in tree demography across global forests
- 2024
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Ingår i: Ecography. - 0906-7590 .- 1600-0587.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The future trajectory of global forests is closely intertwined with tree demography, and a major fundamental goal in ecology is to understand the key mechanisms governing spatio-temporal patterns in tree population dynamics. While previous research has made substantial progress in identifying the mechanisms individually, their relative importance among forests remains unclear mainly due to practical limitations. One approach to overcome these limitations is to group mechanisms according to their shared effects on the variability of tree vital rates and quantify patterns therein. We developed a conceptual and statistical framework (variance partitioning of Bayesian multilevel models) that attributes the variability in tree growth, mortality, and recruitment to variation in species, space, and time, and their interactions – categories we refer to as organising principles (OPs). We applied the framework to data from 21 forest plots covering more than 2.9 million trees of approximately 6500 species. We found that differences among species, the species OP, proved a major source of variability in tree vital rates, explaining 28–33% of demographic variance alone, and 14–17% in interaction with space, totalling 40–43%. Our results support the hypothesis that the range of vital rates is similar across global forests. However, the average variability among species declined with species richness, indicating that diverse forests featured smaller interspecific differences in vital rates. Moreover, decomposing the variance in vital rates into the proposed OPs showed the importance of unexplained variability, which includes individual variation, in tree demography. A focus on how demographic variance is organized in forests can facilitate the construction of more targeted models with clearer expectations of which covariates might drive a vital rate. This study therefore highlights the most promising avenues for future research, both in terms of understanding the relative contributions of groups of mechanisms to forest demography and diversity, and for improving projections of forest ecosystems.
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| 17. |
- Rowland, L, et al.
(författare)
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Death from drought in tropical forests is triggered by hydraulics not carbon starvation.
- 2015
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 528:7580, s. 119-122
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Drought threatens tropical rainforests over seasonal to decadal timescales, but the drivers of tree mortality following drought remain poorly understood. It has been suggested that reduced availability of non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) critically increases mortality risk through insufficient carbon supply to metabolism ('carbon starvation'). However, little is known about how NSC stores are affected by drought, especially over the long term, and whether they are more important than hydraulic processes in determining drought-induced mortality. Using data from the world's longest-running experimental drought study in tropical rainforest (in the Brazilian Amazon), we test whether carbon starvation or deterioration of the water-conducting pathways from soil to leaf trigger tree mortality. Biomass loss from mortality in the experimentally droughted forest increased substantially after >10 years of reduced soil moisture availability. The mortality signal was dominated by the death of large trees, which were at a much greater risk of hydraulic deterioration than smaller trees. However, we find no evidence that the droughted trees suffered carbon starvation, as their NSC concentrations were similar to those of non-droughted trees, and growth rates did not decline in either living or dying trees. Our results indicate that hydraulics, rather than carbon starvation, triggers tree death from drought in tropical rainforest.
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| 18. |
- Schroeder, Kari B., et al.
(författare)
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Haplotypic background of a private allele at high frequency in the Americas
- 2009
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Ingår i: Molecular biology and evolution. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0737-4038 .- 1537-1719. ; 26:5, s. 995-1016
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recently, the observation of a high-frequency private allele,the 9-repeat allele at microsatellite D9S1120, in all sampledNative American and Western Beringian populations has been interpretedas evidence that all modern Native Americans descend primarilyfrom a single founding population. However, this inference assumedthat all copies of the 9-repeat allele were identical by descentand that the geographic distribution of this allele had notbeen influenced by natural selection. To investigate whetherthese assumptions are satisfied, we genotyped 34 single nucleotidepolymorphisms across 500 kilobases (kb) around D9S1120 in 21Native American and Western Beringian populations and 54 otherworldwide populations. All chromosomes with the 9-repeat alleleshare the same haplotypic background in the vicinity of D9S1120,suggesting that all sampled copies of the 9-repeat allele areidentical by descent. Ninety-one percent of these chromosomesshare the same 76.26 kb haplotype, which we call the "AmericanModal Haplotype" (AMH). Three observations lead us to concludethat the high frequency and widespread distribution of the 9-repeatallele are unlikely to be the result of positive selection:1) aside from its association with the 9-repeat allele, theAMH does not have a high frequency in the Americas, 2) the AMHis not unusually long for its frequency compared with otherhaplotypes in the Americas, and 3) in Latin American mestizopopulations, the proportion of Native American ancestry at D9S1120is not unusual compared with that observed at other genomewidemicrosatellites. Using a new method for estimating the timeto the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all sampled copiesof an allele on the basis of an estimate of the length of thegenealogy descended from the MRCA, we calculate the mean timeto the MRCA of the 9-repeat allele to be between 7,325 and 39,900years, depending on the demographic model used. The resultssupport the hypothesis that all modern Native Americans andWestern Beringians trace a large portion of their ancestry toa single founding population that may have been isolated fromother Asian populations prior to expanding into the Americas.
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| 19. |
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