The admixture of sp. in stands influences wood anatomical trait responses to climatic variability and drought events.

Introduction: Forests are threatened by increasingly severe and more frequent drought events worldwide. Mono-specific forests, developed as a consequence of widespread management practices established early last century, seem particularly susceptible to global warming and drought compared with mixed-species forests. Although, in several contexts, mixed-species forests display higher species diversity, higher productivity, and higher resilience, previous studies highlighted contrasting findings, with not only many positive but also neutral or negative effects on tree performance that could be related to tree species diversity.

Diversity-biomass relationship across forest layers: implications for niche complementarity and selection effects.

Forest stratification plays a crucial role in light interception and plant photosynthetic activities. However, despite the increased number of studies on biodiversity-ecosystem function, we still lack information on how stratification in tropical forests modulates biodiversity effects. Moreover, there is less investigation and argument on the role of species and functional traits in forest layers.

Climate change accelerates growth of urban trees in metropolises worldwide.

Despite the importance of urban trees, their growth reaction to climate change and to the urban heat island effect has not yet been investigated with an international scope. While we are well informed about forest growth under recent conditions, it is unclear if this knowledge can be simply transferred to urban environments. Based on tree ring analyses in ten metropolises worldwide, we show that, in general, urban trees have undergone accelerated growth since the 1960s.