Tropical forests responses to a changing climate: a quest at the interface between trait-based ecology, forest dynamics and remote sensing

The most pressing questions in ecology and ecosystems science today focus on how communities of organisms respond to global environmental changes. How is biodiversity affected by climate change? And, how does biodiversity influence ecosystem resilience to climate change? In terms of Earth system science, we need to understand and model how the terrestrial biosphere will respond (and already is responding) to atmospheric change, and whether there are dangerous thresholds or "tipping points" beyond which major biomes may not be able to recover.

Nowhere is the challenge more urgent or more daunting than in the species-rich tropical forest and woody savanna biomes, which together are home to more than 50% of global diversity and over 60% of terrestrial productivity2. There is already mounting evidence that atmospheric change is having an effect on tropical forest productivity and tree composition3. This response may include a stimulation of productivity (caused perhaps through rising CO2), and/ or a degradation or dieback, caused perhaps by increased seasonality and increased frequency of extreme drought events, such as the two "once-a-century" droughts experienced by Amazonia in 2005 and 2010, and the intense El Niño-associated drought of 2015 that affected many tropical regions worldwide. However, we cannot adequately understand or simulate such responses with current ecosystem model approaches that cannot capture the high diversity and the quasi-continuum nature of plant ecosystem function in the species-rich tropics. Neglect of functional biodiversity can greatly oversimplify and over-sensitise the simulated response of an ecosystem to an environmental disturbance.

Some of the key challenges we face revolve around how can we track changes in the species composition and function of tropical ecosystems as they respond to global change. The use of plant functional traits provides a potential way forward by simplifying tropical biodiversity into a few key axes of functional variation.

This project will conduct the first analysis of long term functional change in intact tropical forests and woody savannas. Firstly, it will explore how tree communities and their functional characteristics have shifted over time under a changing climate, by combining long-term forest inventory data form across the tropics with newly collected and collated data on tropical tree functional traits. It will also examine how the patterns of traits shifts vary across bioclimatic regions, which encompass different elevation, latitude and climatic conditions, to gain greater insight into how soils and past climate variation influence current sensitivity to climate change. Next it will examine whether the associated shifts in ecosystem species composition are sufficiently rapid to keep pace with the observed rates of climate change. Finally, it will explore the potential of monitor trait patterns at scale through the use of the newest generation of satellite multispectral data from the European Space Agency Sentinel-2 Copernicus mission.

This project will bring a step-change in i) our understanding of how climatic changes drive traits distributions, ii) our ability to predict functional trait composition by remote sensing, iii) will impact the way how we track the progress towards, an inform sections of, international policy such as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets (Goal A and C), Sustainable Development Goals (combating climate change and its impacts), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and iv) will foster a transition from a descriptive to a more predictive trait ecology.

I have a strong track record in involving local researchers and students in our field work, and encouraging them to use data collections to publish dissertations, and local and international papers. Many tropical countries still have only a few scientists with the skills and confidence to publish papers in international standard journals. Within this project I will run explicitly funded ecological data analysis including remote sensing training workshops at the start of field campaigns in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Peru, Ghana and Gabon. Through my past to present research, I have a long-term record of building capacity with partner institutes, assisting students to find graduate positions in a variety of countries and giving them ready access to data and assistance with analysis.

I will produce videos demonstrating step-by-step the process followed to obtain the final datasets as maps and spatially explicit models planned in this project. These videos will be shared online through a dedicated YouTube channel. The videos will be specially focused on statistical and spatial data analysis (e.g. for the the multispectral Sentinel-2 data handling) and manipulation. Such video tutorials will be useful for bachelor, master and early PhD students working in the fields of ecology and remote sensing

-Schools and the general public seeking to understand and be motivated by modern tropical forest science
There is a need to motivate and engage schoolchildren about the importance of forests and environmental science, as well as a demand from the wider public for access to the latest science. Tropical forests are particularly appealing and exciting, and multispectral images of forest canopies offer an entryway to explain concepts such as forest structure and composition. I will create online resources to foster science communication (social network, webpages) as well as we will visit primary schools in Oxfordshire to present my work.

-The scientific community engaged in understanding tropical forest ecology and function, and its sensitivity to environmental change. The scientific beneficiaries have been outlined in the academic beneficiaries section.

-Local, national and International non-governmental organizations.
I will apply to the Rainforest's Alliance "Innovative Fund Projects - Climate Change Resilience" so that the outcomes of this project are incorporated in their broader forest conservation research agenda. I will further liaise and connect with the work of key environmental organisations such as WWF, Nature Conservancy and EarthWatch by directly sharing the data generated and looking for opportunities to distribute the outputs and add value to their policy influencing and education activities.

-Local Government Agencies.
I will establish through our network of Project Partners direct contact with these agencies and share the data generated from this project. I have a long-term collaboration with CONABIO (Mexico) and the Lankaster botanical garden in Costa Rica, and project collaborators have a long-term track record of direct relationship with government agencies across the world. Some of these agencies are already project partners in this proposal, e.g. CIFOR in Ghana. Through this research I will be in direct communication with these agencies and seek collaboration and dissemination of results.

This fellowship will have societal impact by: informaing into global environmental change effects on tropical ecosystems, highlighting which tropical forests across regions are most susceptible to environmental change effects and thus providing a basis for prioritising the conservation policy. Moreover, this fellowship will inform about main drivers of functional changes, so that regional impacts can be better predicted and adaptation and conservation action target those drivers of change. Lastly, it will allow regional decision making on areas for conservation and facilitate progress tracking of policy goals.