Future climate doubles the risk of hydraulic failure in a wet tropical forest.

Future climate presents conflicting implications for forest biomass. We evaluate how plant hydraulic traits, elevated CO levels, warming, and changes in precipitation affect forest primary productivity, evapotranspiration, and the risk of hydraulic failure. We used a dynamic vegetation model with plant hydrodynamics (FATES-HYDRO) to simulate the stand-level responses to future climate changes in a wet tropical forest in Barro Colorado Island, Panama.

Needle bacterial community structure across the species range of limber pine.

Bacteria on and inside leaves can influence forest tree health and resilience. The distribution and limits of a tree species' range can be influenced by various factors, with biological interactions among the most significant. We investigated the processes shaping the bacterial needle community across the species distribution of limber pine, a widespread Western conifer inhabiting a range of extreme habitats.

Allometric relationships and trade-offs in 11 common Mediterranean-climate grasses.

Biomass allocation in plants is the foundation for understanding dynamics in ecosystem carbon balance, species competition, and plant-environment interactions. However, existing work on plant allometry has mainly focused on trees, with fewer studies having developed allometric equations for grasses. Grasses with different life histories can vary in their carbon investment by prioritizing the growth of specific organs to survive, outcompete co-occurring plants, and ensure population persistence.

Erratum: Publisher Correction: Mel replacement of dengue-competent mosquitoes is robust to near-term climate change.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/s41558-023-01746-w.].

Accounting for herbaceous communities in process-based models will advance our understanding of "grassy" ecosystems.

Grassland and other herbaceous communities cover significant portions of Earth's terrestrial surface and provide many critical services, such as carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, and food production. Forecasts of global change impacts on these services will require predictive tools, such as process-based dynamic vegetation models. Yet, model representation of herbaceous communities and ecosystems lags substantially behind that of tree communities and forests.

Mel replacement of dengue-competent mosquitoes is robust to near-term change.

Rising temperatures are impacting the range and prevalence of mosquito-borne diseases. A promising biocontrol technology replaces wild mosquitoes with those carrying the virus-blocking bacterium. Because the most widely used strain, Mel, is adversely affected by heat stress, we examined how global warming may influence Mel-based replacement.

Linking soil phosphorus with forest litterfall resistance and resilience to cyclone disturbance: A pantropical meta-analysis.

While tropical cyclone regimes are shifting with climate change, the mechanisms underpinning the resistance (ability to withstand disturbance-induced change) and resilience (capacity to return to pre-disturbance reference) of tropical forest litterfall to cyclones remain largely unexplored pantropically. Single-site studies in Australia and Hawaii suggest that litterfall on low-phosphorus (P) soils is more resistant and less resilient to cyclones. We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate the pantropical importance of total soil P in mediating forest litterfall resistance and resilience to 22 tropical cyclones.

Simulating environmentally-sensitive tree recruitment in vegetation demographic models.

Vegetation demographic models (VDMs) endeavor to predict how global forests will respond to climate change. This requires simulating which trees, if any, are able to recruit under changing environmental conditions. We present a new recruitment scheme for VDMs in which functional-type-specific recruitment rates are sensitive to light, soil moisture and the productivity of reproductive trees.

Warming increased bark beetle-induced tree mortality by 30% during an extreme drought in California.

Quantifying the responses of forest disturbances to climate warming is critical to our understanding of carbon cycles and energy balances of the Earth system. The impact of warming on bark beetle outbreaks is complex as multiple drivers of these events may respond differently to warming. Using a novel model of bark beetle biology and host tree interactions, we assessed how contemporary warming affected western pine beetle (Dendroctonus brevicomis) populations and mortality of its host, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), during an extreme drought in the Sierra Nevada, California, United States.

Hydraulically-vulnerable trees survive on deep-water access during droughts in a tropical forest.

Deep-water access is arguably the most effective, but under-studied, mechanism that plants employ to survive during drought. Vulnerability to embolism and hydraulic safety margins can predict mortality risk at given levels of dehydration, but deep-water access may delay plant dehydration. Here, we tested the role of deep-water access in enabling survival within a diverse tropical forest community in Panama using a novel data-model approach.

Warming acts through earlier snowmelt to advance but not extend alpine community flowering.

Large-scale warming will alter multiple local climate factors in alpine tundra, yet very few experimental studies examine the combined yet distinct influences of earlier snowmelt, higher temperatures and altered soil moisture on alpine ecosystems. This limits our ability to predict responses to climate change by plant species and communities. To address this gap, we used infrared heaters and manual watering in a fully factorial experiment to determine the relative importance of these climate factors on plant flowering phenology, and response differences among plant functional groups.

Precipitation mediates sap flux sensitivity to evaporative demand in the neotropics.

Transpiration in humid tropical forests modulates the global water cycle and is a key driver of climate regulation. Yet, our understanding of how tropical trees regulate sap flux in response to climate variability remains elusive. With a progressively warming climate, atmospheric evaporative demand [i.

A meta-analysis of 1,119 manipulative experiments on terrestrial carbon-cycling responses to global change.

Direct quantification of terrestrial biosphere responses to global change is crucial for projections of future climate change in Earth system models. Here, we synthesized ecosystem carbon-cycling data from 1,119 experiments performed over the past four decades concerning changes in temperature, precipitation, CO and nitrogen across major terrestrial vegetation types of the world. Most experiments manipulated single rather than multiple global change drivers in temperate ecosystems of the USA, Europe and China.

Homoeostatic maintenance of nonstructural carbohydrates during the 2015-2016 El Niño drought across a tropical forest precipitation gradient.

Nonstructural carbohydrates (NSCs) are essential for maintenance of plant metabolism and may be sensitive to short- and long-term climatic variation. NSC variation in moist tropical forests has rarely been studied, so regulation of NSCs in these systems is poorly understood. We measured foliar and branch NSC content in 23 tree species at three sites located across a large precipitation gradient in Panama during the 2015-2016 El Niño to examine how short- and long-term climatic variation impact carbohydrate dynamics.

Snowmelt Timing Regulates Community Composition, Phenology, and Physiological Performance of Alpine Plants.

The spatial patterning of alpine plant communities is strongly influenced by the variation in physical factors such as temperature and moisture, which are strongly affected by snow depth and snowmelt patterns. Earlier snowmelt timing and greater soil-moisture limitations may favor wide-ranging species adapted to a broader set of ecohydrological conditions than alpine-restricted species. We asked how plant community composition, phenology, plant water relations, and photosynthetic gas exchange of alpine-restricted and wide-ranging species differ in their responses to a ca.

Variation in hydroclimate sustains tropical forest biomass and promotes functional diversity.

The fate of tropical forests under climate change is unclear as a result, in part, of the uncertainty in projected changes in precipitation and in the ability of vegetation models to capture the effects of drought-induced mortality on aboveground biomass (AGB). We evaluated the ability of a terrestrial biosphere model with demography and hydrodynamics (Ecosystem Demography, ED2-hydro) to simulate AGB and mortality of four tropical tree plant functional types (PFTs) that operate along light- and water-use axes. Model predictions were compared with observations of canopy trees at Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama.

Comparative Transcriptomics Among Four White Pine Species.

Conifers are the dominant plant species throughout the high latitude boreal forests as well as some lower latitude temperate forests of North America, Europe, and Asia. As such, they play an integral economic and ecological role across much of the world. This study focused on the characterization of needle transcriptomes from four ecologically important and understudied North American white pines within the subgenus The populations of many species are challenged by native and introduced pathogens, native insects, and abiotic factors.

Drivers and mechanisms of tree mortality in moist tropical forests.

Tree mortality rates appear to be increasing in moist tropical forests (MTFs) with significant carbon cycle consequences. Here, we review the state of knowledge regarding MTF tree mortality, create a conceptual framework with testable hypotheses regarding the drivers, mechanisms and interactions that may underlie increasing MTF mortality rates, and identify the next steps for improved understanding and reduced prediction. Increasing mortality rates are associated with rising temperature and vapor pressure deficit, liana abundance, drought, wind events, fire and, possibly, CO fertilization-induced increases in stand thinning or acceleration of trees reaching larger, more vulnerable heights.

Seed origin and warming constrain lodgepole pine recruitment, slowing the pace of population range shifts.

Understanding how climate warming will affect the demographic rates of different ecotypes is critical to predicting shifts in species distributions. Here, we present results from a common garden, climate change experiment in which we measured seedling recruitment of lodgepole pine, a widespread North American conifer that is also planted globally. Seeds from a low-elevation provenance had more than three-fold greater recruitment to their third year than seeds from a high-elevation provenance across sites within and above its native elevation range and across climate manipulations.

Climate and landscape drive the pace and pattern of conifer encroachment into subalpine meadows.

Mountain meadows have high biodiversity and help regulate stream water release following the snowmelt pulse. However, many meadows are experiencing woody plant encroachment, threatening these ecosystem services. While there have been field surveys of individual meadows and remote sensing-based landscape-scale studies of encroachment, what is missing is a broad-scale, ground-based study to understand common regional drivers, especially at high elevations, where land management has often played a less direct role.