Publications by authors named "Libalah Moses"

Forest expansion into savanna is a pervasive phenomenon in West and Central Africa, warranting comparative studies under diverse environmental conditions. We collected vegetation data from the woody and grassy components within 73 plots of 0.16 ha distributed along a successional gradient from humid savanna to forest in Central Africa.

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Article Synopsis
  • Accurately mapping tropical forests' aboveground biomass (AGB) is essential for effective carbon emission reduction and understanding the carbon cycle, yet existing maps often show inconsistent estimates.
  • To overcome this issue, the study focuses on creating high-quality reference AGB datasets using field plots and airborne LiDAR data from underrepresented regions in Central Africa and South Asia.
  • These reference maps, with detailed uncertainty information, will help enhance the accuracy of future Earth Observation missions and improve AGB mapping reliability.
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Trees structure the Earth's most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge.

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Article Synopsis
  • The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) reflects a global trend showing that species richness typically increases towards the tropics, but understanding its causes has been challenging due to insufficient data.
  • A new high-resolution map of local tree species richness was created using extensive global forest inventory data and local biophysical factors, analyzing around 1.3 million sample plots.
  • Findings indicate that annual mean temperature is a significant predictor of tree species richness, aligning with the metabolic theory of biodiversity, but additional local factors also play a crucial role, especially in tropical regions.
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  • Forest biomass plays a crucial role in the Earth's carbon cycle and is essential for climate change initiatives like REDD+, but there is uncertainty in measuring aboveground biomass (AGB) in tropical forests.
  • The new Congo basin Forests AGB (CoFor-AGB) dataset includes AGB estimates and uncertainties for nearly 60,000 1-km pixels, based on field data from extensive forest management inventories in central Africa between 2000 and the early 2010s.
  • The dataset reveals a large-scale view of AGB variations in central Africa, providing valuable data for addressing uncertainties in forest biomass measurements, which is critical for environmental research and climate action.
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Wood density (WD) relates to important tree functions such as stem mechanics and resistance against pathogens. This functional trait can exhibit high intraindividual variability both radially and vertically. With the rise of LiDAR-based methodologies allowing nondestructive tree volume estimations, failing to account for WD variations related to tree function and biomass investment strategies may lead to large systematic bias in AGB estimations.

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