Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities.

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.

Integrated global assessment of the natural forest carbon potential.

Forests are a substantial terrestrial carbon sink, but anthropogenic changes in land use and climate have considerably reduced the scale of this system. Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests are characterized by considerable uncertainty and we lack a comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation to benchmark these estimates. Here we combine several ground-sourced and satellite-derived approaches to evaluate the scale of the global forest carbon potential outside agricultural and urban lands.

The global biogeography of tree leaf form and habit.

Understanding what controls global leaf type variation in trees is crucial for comprehending their role in terrestrial ecosystems, including carbon, water and nutrient dynamics. Yet our understanding of the factors influencing forest leaf types remains incomplete, leaving us uncertain about the global proportions of needle-leaved, broadleaved, evergreen and deciduous trees. To address these gaps, we conducted a global, ground-sourced assessment of forest leaf-type variation by integrating forest inventory data with comprehensive leaf form (broadleaf vs needle-leaf) and habit (evergreen vs deciduous) records.

Native diversity buffers against severity of non-native tree invasions.

Determining the drivers of non-native plant invasions is critical for managing native ecosystems and limiting the spread of invasive species. Tree invasions in particular have been relatively overlooked, even though they have the potential to transform ecosystems and economies. Here, leveraging global tree databases, we explore how the phylogenetic and functional diversity of native tree communities, human pressure and the environment influence the establishment of non-native tree species and the subsequent invasion severity.

Implications of tropical cyclones on damage and potential recovery and restoration of logged forests in Vietnam.

Many natural forests in Southeast Asia are degraded following decades of logging. Restoration of these forests is delayed by ongoing logging and tropical cyclones, but the implications for recovery are largely uncertain. We analysed meteorological, satellite and forest inventory plot data to assess the effect of Typhoon Doksuri, a major tropical cyclone, on the forest landscapes of central Vietnam consisting of natural forests and plantations.

The number of tree species on Earth.

One of the most fundamental questions in ecology is how many species inhabit the Earth. However, due to massive logistical and financial challenges and taxonomic difficulties connected to the species concept definition, the global numbers of species, including those of important and well-studied life forms such as trees, still remain largely unknown. Here, based on global ground-sourced data, we estimate the total tree species richness at global, continental, and biome levels.

The Forest Observation System, building a global reference dataset for remote sensing of forest biomass.

Forest biomass is an essential indicator for monitoring the Earth's ecosystems and climate. It is a critical input to greenhouse gas accounting, estimation of carbon losses and forest degradation, assessment of renewable energy potential, and for developing climate change mitigation policies such as REDD+, among others. Wall-to-wall mapping of aboveground biomass (AGB) is now possible with satellite remote sensing (RS).

Testing for changes in biomass dynamics in large-scale forest datasets.

Tropical forest responses to climate and atmospheric change are critical to the future of the global carbon budget. Recent studies have reported increases in estimated above-ground biomass (EAGB) stocks, productivity, and mortality in old-growth tropical forests. These increases could reflect a shift in forest functioning due to global change and/or long-lasting recovery from past disturbance.

Estimating aboveground net biomass change for tropical and subtropical forests: Refinement of IPCC default rates using forest plot data.

As countries advance in greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting for climate change mitigation, consistent estimates of aboveground net biomass change (∆AGB) are needed. Countries with limited forest monitoring capabilities in the tropics and subtropics rely on IPCC 2006 default ∆AGB rates, which are values per ecological zone, per continent. Similarly, research into forest biomass change at a large scale also makes use of these rates.

Field methods for sampling tree height for tropical forest biomass estimation.

Quantifying the relationship between tree diameter and height is a key component of efforts to estimate biomass and carbon stocks in tropical forests. Although substantial site-to-site variation in height-diameter allometries has been documented, the time consuming nature of measuring all tree heights in an inventory plot means that most studies do not include height, or else use generic pan-tropical or regional allometric equations to estimate height.Using a pan-tropical dataset of 73 plots where at least 150 trees had in-field ground-based height measurements, we examined how the number of trees sampled affects the performance of locally derived height-diameter allometries, and evaluated the performance of different methods for sampling trees for height measurement.

Author Correction: Long-term carbon sink in Borneo's forests halted by drought and vulnerable to edges.

The original version of this Article contained an error in the third sentence of the abstract and incorrectly read "Here, using long-term plot monitoring records of up to half a century, we find that intact forests in Borneo gained 0.43 Mg C ha year (95% CI 0.14-0.

Long-term carbon sink in Borneo's forests halted by drought and vulnerable to edge effects.

Less than half of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions remain in the atmosphere. While carbon balance models imply large carbon uptake in tropical forests, direct on-the-ground observations are still lacking in Southeast Asia. Here, using long-term plot monitoring records of up to half a century, we find that intact forests in Borneo gained 0.

Diversity and carbon storage across the tropical forest biome.

Tropical forests are global centres of biodiversity and carbon storage. Many tropical countries aspire to protect forest to fulfil biodiversity and climate mitigation policy targets, but the conservation strategies needed to achieve these two functions depend critically on the tropical forest tree diversity-carbon storage relationship. Assessing this relationship is challenging due to the scarcity of inventories where carbon stocks in aboveground biomass and species identifications have been simultaneously and robustly quantified.

A methodological framework to assess the carbon balance of tropical managed forests.

Background: Managed forests are a major component of tropical landscapes. Production forests as designated by national forest services cover up to 400 million ha, i.e.

Rapid tree carbon stock recovery in managed Amazonian forests.

While around 20% of the Amazonian forest has been cleared for pastures and agriculture, one fourth of the remaining forest is dedicated to wood production. Most of these production forests have been or will be selectively harvested for commercial timber, but recent studies show that even soon after logging, harvested stands retain much of their tree-biomass carbon and biodiversity. Comparing species richness of various animal taxa among logged and unlogged forests across the tropics, Burivalova et al.

Community assessment of tropical tree biomass: challenges and opportunities for REDD.

Background: REDD+ programs rely on accurate forest carbon monitoring. Several REDD+ projects have recently shown that local communities can monitor above ground biomass as well as external professionals, but at lower costs. However, the precision and accuracy of carbon monitoring conducted by local communities have rarely been assessed in the tropics.

An estimate of the number of tropical tree species.

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher's alpha and an approximate pantropical stem total to estimate the minimum number of tropical forest tree species to fall between ∼ 40,000 and ∼ 53,000, i.e.

Revisiting a universal airborne light detection and ranging approach for tropical forest carbon mapping: scaling-up from tree to stand to landscape.

Airborne laser scanning provides continuous coverage mapping of forest canopy height and thereby is a powerful tool to scale-up above-ground biomass (AGB) estimates from stand to landscape. A critical first step is the selection of the plot variables which can be related to light detection and ranging (LiDAR) statistics. A universal approach was previously proposed which combines local and regional estimates of basal area (BA) and wood density with LiDAR-derived canopy height to map carbon at a regional scale (Asner et al.