Rising rainfall intensity induces spatially divergent hydrological changes within a large river basin.

Droughts or floods are usually attributed to precipitation deficits or surpluses, both of which may become more frequent and severe under continued global warming. Concurring large-scale droughts in the Southwest and flooding in the Southeast of China in recent decades have attracted considerable attention, but their causes and interrelations are not well understood. Here, we examine spatiotemporal changes in hydrometeorological variables and investigate the mechanism underlying contrasting soil dryness/wetness patterns over a 54-year period (1965-2018) across a representative mega-watershed in South China-the West River Basin.

The biodiversity and ecosystem service contributions and trade-offs of forest restoration approaches.

Forest restoration is being scaled up globally to deliver critical ecosystem services and biodiversity benefits; however, there is a lack of rigorous comparison of cobenefit delivery across different restoration approaches. Through global synthesis, we used 25,950 matched data pairs from 264 studies in 53 countries to assess how delivery of climate, soil, water, and wood production services, in addition to biodiversity, compares across a range of tree plantations and native forests. Benefits of aboveground carbon storage, water provisioning, and especially soil erosion control and biodiversity are better delivered by native forests, with compositionally simpler, younger plantations in drier regions performing particularly poorly.

Transpiration and stomatal conductance in a young secondary tropical montane forest: contrasts between native trees and invasive understorey shrubs.

It has been suggested that vigorous secondary tropical forests can have very high transpiration rates, but sap flow and stomatal conductance dynamics of trees and shrubs in these forests are understudied. In an effort to address this knowledge gap, sap flow (thermal dissipation method, 12 trees) and stomatal conductance (porometry, six trees) were measured for young (5-7 years) Psiadia altissima (DC.) Drake trees, a widely occurring species dominating young regrowth following abandonment of swidden agriculture in upland eastern Madagascar.