Journal article
Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change
- Abstract:
- Understanding the capacity of forests to adapt to climate change is of pivotal importance for conservation science, yet this is still widely unknown. This knowledge gap is particularly acute in high-biodiversity tropical forests. Here, we examined how tropical forests of the Americas have shifted community trait composition in recent decades as a response to changes in climate. Based on historical trait-climate relationships, we found that, overall, the studied functional traits show shifts of less than 8% of what would be expected given the observed changes in climate. However, the recruit assemblage shows shifts of 21% relative to climate change expectation. The most diverse forests on Earth are changing in functional trait composition but at a rate that is fundamentally insufficient to track climate change.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Accepted manuscript, pdf, 188.1KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1126/science.adl5414
Authors
+ Natural Environment Research Council
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/02b5d8509
- Grant:
- NE/T011084/1
- NE/Z504191/1
- NE/K016431/1
- NE/S01084X/1
- Publisher:
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Journal:
- Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 387
- Issue:
- 6738
- Article number:
- eadl541
- Publication date:
- 2025-03-07
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-01-08
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1095-9203
- ISSN:
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0036-8075
- Language:
-
English
- Pubs id:
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2084368
- Local pid:
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pubs:2084368
- Deposit date:
-
2025-02-07
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Aguirre-Gutiérrez et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © 2025 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
- Notes:
- The author accepted manuscript (AAM) of this paper has been made available under the University of Oxford's Open Access Publications Policy, and a CC BY public copyright licence has been applied.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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