Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/36886
Appears in Collections:Biological and Environmental Sciences Journal Articles
Peer Review Status: Refereed
Title: Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests
Author(s): Abernethy, Katharine
Jeffery, Kathryn
Contact Email: k.a.abernethy@stir.ac.uk
Date Deposited: 10-Mar-2025
Citation: Abernethy K & Jeffery K (2025) Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests. <i>Nature</i>. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08663-2
Abstract: Tropical forest canopies are the biosphere’s most concentrated atmospheric interface for carbon, water and energy1,2. However, in most Earth System Models, the diverse and heterogeneous tropical forest biome is represented as a largely uniform ecosystem with either a singular or a small number of fixed canopy ecophysiological properties 3. This situation arises, in part, from a lack of understanding about how and why the functional properties of tropical forest canopies vary geographically 4. Here, by combining feld-collected data from more than 1,800 vegetation plots and tree traits with satellite remote-sensing, terrain, climate and soil data, we predict variation across 13 morphological, structural and chemical functional traits of trees, and use this to compute and map the functional diversity of tropical forests. Our findings reveal that the tropical Americas, Africa and Asia tend to occupy different portions of the total functional trait space available across tropical forests. Tropical American forests are predicted to have 40% greater functional richness than tropical African and Asian forests. Meanwhile, African forests have the highest functional divergence—32% and 7% higher than that of tropical American and Asian forests, respectively. An uncertainty analysis highlights priority regions for further data collection, which would refine and improve these maps. Our predictions represent a ground-based and remotely enabled global analysis of how and why the functional traits of tropical forest canopies vary across space.
DOI Link: 10.1038/s41586-025-08663-2
Rights: Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2025
Licence URL(s): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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