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Throughout its ~4.5 billion year history, the Earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling. However, the current drastic increase in global temperatures is well outside of the Earth’s cyclic norms, and evidence for human-caused global climate change is compelling. Paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climate conditions, provides ample evidence for human-caused global climate change by comparing recent conditions with those in the past.
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Amazonian and Andean tree communities are not tracking current climate warming.

William Farfan-Rios1,2, Kenneth J Feeley3, Jonathan A Myers4

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
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Tropical forests are slow to adapt to climate change. Most tree species cannot shift ranges fast enough, threatening biodiversity in these vital ecosystems.

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Area of Science:

  • Ecology
  • Climate Change Biology
  • Tropical Forest Ecology

Background:

  • Climate change is causing global shifts in species distributions and altering ecological communities.
  • Tropical forests, particularly their responses to climate change across large environmental gradients, are understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To assess community-level shifts in species composition in tropical forests along the Amazon-to-Andes elevational gradient over 40+ years.
  • To test the thermophilization hypothesis (increased abundance of warm-adapted species) in response to climate change.
  • To determine the drivers of compositional change, including tree mortality, recruitment, and growth.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized long-term monitoring data from over 66,000 trees across 2,500 species on the Amazon-to-Andes elevational gradient (Peru and Bolivia).
  • Analyzed community composition changes over more than four decades.
  • Quantified thermophilization rates (TR) and investigated the roles of mortality, recruitment, and growth.

Main Results:

  • Thermophilization rates (TR) were generally slow compared to regional temperature increases.
  • TR were more variable in Andean forests than Amazonian forests, peaking at mid-elevations.
  • Compositional changes were primarily driven by increased mortality and reduced growth of cool-adapted species, not by an influx of warm-adapted species.

Conclusions:

  • Most tropical tree species, especially from the Amazon basin, face significant challenges in shifting their ranges to cope with climate change.
  • The slow rate of compositional change and high tree mortality indicate that tropical forests may not adapt quickly enough to warming.
  • These changes risk fundamentally altering the composition and ecological functions of Earth's most diverse forests.