We find that 🌳 demography is not uniform, even within a species’ range.
Accounting for this mosaic of mortality can improve management & conservation of forests facing intensifying stressors, and stresses the crucial role of permanent plots across environmental gradients. @umramap.bsky.social
🧵8/9

🌎 Take-home message:
To predict forest futures, we need to go beyond climate envelopes — including disturbances, pests, and ontogeny — if we want realistic models of mortality and carbon cycling.
@ird-fr.bsky.social
🧵7/9

🔥 Pinus elliottii (slash pine) and P. palustris (longleaf pine) showed more localised spatial structures.
Extreme weather events (storms, mostly) and fire dominated their high-mortality years (especially 2013–2023).
🧵5/9

🌳 Pinus taeda (loblolly pine) stood out:
Its survival has clearly declined over the past two decades across its natural range.
This pattern was spatially consistent and mostly linked to weather, insects, and competition.
🧵4/9

We found that mortality patterns form a mosaic across space and time — and change in nonlinear ways with tree size (ontogeny).
👉 Most interspecific differences appear in saplings (2.5 to 10 cm DBH) and near maximum tree size.
🧵3/9

Tree mortality isn’t random — it depends on who you are, where you grow, and what happens to you.
We analysed demographic data from ~130,000 trees across 14,500 plots (years 2003–2023), looking at mortality agents like competition, storms, fire, insects, and disease.
🧵2/9

With #COP30 next month in Belém 🇧🇷, we hope this will be a wake-up call: tropical forests are under growing pressure from climate change.
Safeguarding them demands ambitious and fair climate action, including stronger support for countries that protect these vital ecosystems for us all. 🌳🌡️📈
[5/5]

Of course, this doesn’t mean these forests have lost all climate value ➡️ they remain immense carbon stores and irreplaceable biodiversity havens.
But it shows that keeping global warming well below 1.5 °C is now even harder—and more urgent. 🌏
[4/5]

Based on 50 yrs of data from ~11 000 trees, we found that the aboveground woody biomass—once absorbing C—now now releases nearly 1 tonne of C per hectare each year.
The cause? Human-driven climate change: hotter extremes, droughts & cyclones are killing more trees than the forest regrow. 🌡️🌪️
[2/5]

These findings show how #causality can be inferred from observational data in #Ecology. Habitat loss, fragmentation, edge effects, degradation, and the functional make-up of tree communities have interdependencies, and require a #CausalModel to disentangle #causation from spurious association!
[4/5]

➡️ Highlights urgent need to conserve / restore #TropicalForests, prevent degradation, and implement measures to protect / boost populations of the large-bodied birds (e.g. toucans) and mammals (e.g. spider monkeys) that disperse the seeds of 'losing' slow-growing large-seeded tree species.
[3/5]

These 'winner-loser replacements' along these gradients of increasing human disruption are also likely to impact wildlife species adapted to consuming / dispersing the large seeds of tree species being lost in human-modified landscapes.
[2/5]

New paper out in @natureecoevo.bsky.social, led by Bruno Pinho, showing how human disruption is driving 'winner' and 'loser' #tree species shifts across tropical forests.
➡️ Fast-growing / small-seeded species dominating Brazilian forests were levels of deforestation and degradation are high.
[1/5]

I was thrilled to give a seminar at @kewgardens.bsky.social last Fri, to discuss #tree #demography as a lens into tropical forest responses to #ClimateChange. It was great to meet colleagues, and to enjoy the oh-so-beautiful greenhouses 🌳🌴🌸🌵!
🙏 to Guillaume Delhaye for the invitation/organisation!

I'll be presenting on this at the #BES2024 conference this Thu, for those of that will be there, and want to talk tropical #tree #demography 🌳, or the importance of causal inference in Ecology 😁
@britishecolsoc.bsky.social

Lovely and nostalgic time visiting friends and colleagues at the @oxfordecosystems.bsky.social lab. Had the pleasure to present new results on tropical #tree growth and its cause-effect relations to climate anomalies across tropical climates. Always such a friendly and stimulating environment! 🌳🌡️☀️