Carbon storage and functional diversity of tropical rainforest in the Congo Basin
Aboveground vs. Belowground Carbon Stocks in African Tropical Lowland Rainforest: Drivers and Implications.
Published in PloS one
We suggest nutrient limitation, especially potassium, as the driver for aboveground versus belowground C allocation. However, other drivers such as C turnover, tree functional traits or demographic considerations cannot be excluded. We argue that large and unaccounted variability in C stocks is to be expected in African tropical rain-forests. Curre...
Leaky nitrogen cycle in pristine African montane rainforest soil
Many pristine humid tropical forests show simultaneously high nitrogen (N) richness and sustained loss of bioavailable N forms. To better understand this apparent upregulation of the N cycle in tropical forests, process-based understanding of soil N transformations, in geographically diverse locations, remains paramount. Field-based evidence is lim...
Functional identity explains carbon sequestration in a 77-year-old experimental tropical plantation
Planting forests is an important practice for climate change mitigation, especially in the tropics where the carbon (C) sequestration potential is high. Successful implementation of this mitigation practice requires knowledge of the role of species identity and diversity on carbon accrual of plantations. Despite this need, solid data on the long-te...
Root System Markup Language: toward a unified root architecture description language
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The number of image analysis tools supporting the extraction of architectural features of root systems has increased over the last years. These tools offer a handy set of complementary facilities, yet it is widely accepted that none of these software tool is able to extract in an efficient way growing array of static and dynamic features for differ...
Improving the ISBACC land surface model simulation of water and carbon fluxes and stocks over the Amazon forest
We evaluate the ISBA(CC) (Interaction Soil Biosphere Atmosphere Carbon Cycle) land surface model (LSM) over the Amazon forest, and propose a revised parameterization of photosynthesis, including new soil water stress and autotrophic respiration (R-A) functions. The revised version allows the model to better capture the energy, water and carbon flux...
An estimate of the number of tropical tree species.
...Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
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 approx...
Forest resilience and tipping points at different spatio-temporal scales: approaches and challenges
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1. Anthropogenic global change compromises forest resilience, with profound impacts to ecosystem functions and services. This synthesis paper reflects on the current understanding of forest resilience and potential tipping points under environmental change and explores challenges to assessing responses using experiments, observations and models. 2....
Modelling Amazonian carbon budgets and vegetation dynamics in a changing climate
Variation in stem mortality rates determines patterns of above-ground biomass in Amazonian forests: implications for dyn...
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Published in Global change biology
Understanding the processes that determine above-ground biomass (AGB) in Amazonian forests is important for predicting the sensitivity of these ecosystems to environmental change and for designing and evaluating dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). AGB is determined by inputs from woody productivity [woody net primary productivity (NPP)] and t...
