Diagnosis and decision-making criteria to attenuate the effect of global change on biodiversity in the Congo Basin forests

The CoForChange project will gather for 4 years a unique interdisciplinary team of researchers and forest engineers: (i) from 8 public and private institutions and 4 European countries, (ii) associated to 6 national and international institutions, to explain and predict the possible fate of tropical moist forests (TMF) of the Congo Basin. Those TMF, of world importance for their biodiversity and their major ecosystem services, are experiencing past and ongoing effects of climate and anthropogenic changes. How, why and where will tree species survive a drying trend and an increase in resource use in this region is a challenging issue for Europe - both consumer and producer of African timber - , most involved in policy-making on biodiversity conservation, forest management and carbon stocks issues. The core hypothesis of CoForChange is that: 'water and/or light availability, driven by climate and anthropogenic change, are the predominant factors shaping TMFs characteristics. They filter species depending on their drought tolerance and light requirement. To test this hypothesis, and fulfill our objectives, we will organize our work into five thematic and one integrative workpackages aiming at: (1) mapping and characterizing tree communities and environmental factors; (2) mapping soil water availability and its sensitivity to rainfall pattern; (3) Analysing past changes in vegetation, disturbance and environmental changes; (4) Characterising drought tolerance, light requirements and associated functional traits of tree species (5) Evaluating the ongoing evolution of tree communities and (6) integrating results to provide diagnostic and decision-making tools to attenuate the effects of global change. Our project will mobilize specialists of remote-sensing, populations and communities ecology, functional ecology, hydrology/climatology, pedology, paleoecology and anthropology, both from the north and the south. We will use existing data, in particular extensive pools of satellite imagery and a unique database on forest inventories, acquire new paleoecological data on sediment cores and soil profiles, analyse new archaeological sites and implement controlled drought and light experiments on the main tree species of the Congo Basin region. We will link information on spatial and temporal variation of tree communities composition, spatial and temporal variation of environmental factors, and species functional traits in order to provide European administratives, national forest administrations, private companies and NGOs with operational tools: (i) thematic maps identifying the oldest, less resilient, faster-evolving or more biodiverse communities; (ii) maps outlining the possible impacts of various scenarios of climate change and anthropogenic change (socio-economic drivers) on future tree species distributions and thus TMFs characteristics; (iii) databases on important species environmental requirements, and (iv) identification of endangered species or groups of species. Those tools will address decision-makers needs to reason, on a sound basis, conservation strategies and sustainable management of forests - comprising timber logging rules - and to adapt their related territories and forest management policies.