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Analysis suggests that to limit global temperature rise, we must slash emissions and invest now to protect, manage and restore ecosystems and land for the future.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

Wood density is a key control on tree biomass, and understanding its spatial variation improves estimates of forest carbon stock. Sullivan et al. measure >900 forest plots to quantify wood density and produce high resolution maps of its variation across South American tropical forests.

Data from a variety of sources—including satellite, climate and soil data, as well as field-collected information on plant traits—are pooled and analysed to map the functional diversity of tropical forest canopies globally.

This study finds that vegetation models commonly underestimate the productivity of West African forests, owing to bias in fractional absorbed photosynthetic radiation (fAPAR) and leaf level photosynthetic capacities.

This study examines the impact of herbivorous insects on biogeochemical cycling within forests. From a global network of 74 plots within 40 mature, undisturbed broadleaved forests, they show that background levels of insect herbivory are sufficiently large to alter both ecosystem element cycling and influence terrestrial carbon cycling.

A dataset of 16 plant traits sampled from 2,461 individual trees from 74 tropical forest sites around the world is used to show a strong link between climate and plant functional diversity and redundancy, with drier tropical forests likely being less able to respond to declines in water availability.

This study finds that West African ecosystems are generally more productive than equivalent ecosystems in Amazonia. It also suggests that a semi-deciduous forest site in Ghana is the world’s most productive forest measured to date.

Different aspects of biodiversity may not necessarily converge in their response to climate change. Here, the authors investigate 25-year shifts in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity of tropical forests along a spatial climate gradient in West Africa, showing that drier forests are less stable than wetter forests.

Wood density is an important plant trait. Data from 1.1 million forest inventory plots and 10,703 tree species show a latitudinal gradient in wood density, with temperature and soil moisture explaining variation at the global scale and disturbance also having a role at the local level.

Logged forests in Borneo have higher energy flow from vegetation to and broad range of bird and mammal species relative to old-growth forests and oil palm plantations, showing that they can be diverse and ecologically vibrant ecosystems.

Planting trees in high-latitude regions can be counterproductive to climate change mitigation, according to a synthesis of the biophysical and ecological impacts of planting trees.

An analysis of the impact of logging intensity on biodiversity in tropical forests in Sabah, Malaysia, identifies a threshold of tree biomass removal below which logged forests still have conservation value.

Using 13 functional traits we characterize the Amazonian trees and the communities they form. Amazonian tree communities are distributed along a fast-slow-spectrum. This results in clear differences in traits among these forests, as well as their biomass and biomass productivity.

Analysing >1,700 inventory plots from the Amazon Tree Diversity Network, the authors show that the majority of Amazon tree species can occupy floodplains and that patterns of species turnover are closely linked to regional flood patterns.

An analysis of tree survival data from forest sites worldwide shows that in the tropics, rare tree species experience stronger stabilizing density dependence than common species, wheras no correlation of stabilizing density dependence and abundance exists in the temperate zone.

The fire ban implemented during burning seasons in the Brazilian Amazon helped reduce the number of fires in 2019 but proved largely ineffective in 2020 and 2021, according to an analysis of observed fires activity and model simulations of expected fires in the absence of a ban over 2019–2021.

Inventory data from more than 1 million trees across African, Amazonian and Southeast Asian tropical forests suggests that, despite their high diversity, just 1,053 species, representing a consistent ~2.2% of tropical tree species in each region, constitute half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees.

Studies of in situ woody surface methane exchange in upland tropical, temperate and boreal forest trees find that methane uptake can result in a net tree methane sink that is globally significant and demonstrates an additional climate benefit provided by trees.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

The authors analyse tree responses to an extreme heat and drought event across South America to understand long-term climate resistance. While no more sensitive to this than previous lesser events, forests in drier climates showed the greatest impacts and thus vulnerability to climate extremes.

Cocoa yield in Brazil, Ghana, and Indonesia was increased by up to 20% by using hand pollination techniques and reduced by up to 31% with 7 °C warmer average temperatures, according to analyses of pollination experiments within each country.

Assessing potential future carbon loss from tropical forests is important for evaluating the efficacy of programmes for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD). An exploration of results from 22 climate models in conjunction with a land surface scheme suggests that in the Americas, Africa and Asia, the resilience of tropical forests to climate change is higher than expected, although uncertainties are large.

Between about 50 and 10 thousand years ago, almost 100 genera of large animals went extinct. Mathematical analyses suggest that the extinctions in Amazonia have led to a reduction in the lateral flux of the limiting nutrient phosphorus—by transport of dung and bodies—by 98%.

Droughts can cause dry-season productivity to decline in tropical forests. This decline occurs when precipitation is below 2,000 mm yr⁻¹, resulting in insufficient subsurface water storage to maintain constant production through the dry season.

Large animal conservation and rewilding are increasingly considered to be viable climate mitigation strategies. We argue that overstating animal roles in carbon capture may hinder, rather than facilitate, effective climate mitigation and conservation efforts.

Ground truthed thermal data from a new NASA satellite combined with experimental warming data from three continents in an empirical model suggests that tropical forests are closer to a high temperature threshold than previously thought.

Tree mortality has been shown to be the dominant control on carbon storage in Amazon forests, but little is known of how and why Amazon forest trees die. Here the authors analyse a large Amazon-wide dataset, finding that fast-growing species face greater mortality risk, but that slower-growing individuals within a species are more likely to die, regardless of size.

Tree species may be vulnerable to multiple global change factors. Here, the authors find that more than 17 thousand tree species are exposed to increasing anthropogenic threats, including many species classified as data-deficient in the IUCN Red List.

A pan-Amazon study of forests shows large variations in drought tolerance traits and finds that forests in regions of pronounced climate change are losing biomass and may be operating beyond their hydraulic limits.

Unlike Amazonian forests, African forests have maintained their carbon sink until recently but by 2030 the African carbon sink will have shrunk by 14 per cent and the Amazonian sink will reach almost zero.

Most Amazon tree species are rare but a small proportion are common across the region. The authors show that different species are hyperdominant in different size classes and that hyperdominance is more phylogenetically restricted for larger canopy trees than for smaller understory ones.

The relationship of mycorrhizal associations with latitudinal gradients in tree beta-diversity is unexplored. Using a global dataset approach, this study examines how trees with arbuscular mycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal associations contribute to latitudinal beta-diversity patterns and the environmental controls of these patterns.

The role of non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) in mediating the impacts of drought in tropical trees is unclear. Here, the authors analyse leaf and branch NSC in 82 Amazon tree species across a Basin-wide precipitation gradient, finding that allocation of leaf NSC to soluble sugars is higher in drier sites and is coupled to tree hydraulic status.

In India, water stress regulates tree cover across biomes, and variation in cover is explained by soil sand fraction, topography, and anthropogenic pressure according to an analysis of remote sensing vegetation data and environmental drivers.

Tropical forest leaves are expected to absorb more of the Sun’s energy with climate warming, which could further increase global temperatures.

With global warming, Andean forests are changing to include more trees of low-elevation, heat-loving species but rates of compositional change are not uniform across elevations and are insufficient to keep species in equilibrium with climate.

Inventory data from 90 lowland Amazonian forest plots and a phylogeny of 526 angiosperm genera were used to show that taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity are both predictive of wood productivity but not of biomass variation.

Human-driven losses of megafauna and megaflora may have disproportionate ecological consequences. Here, the authors combine metabolic scaling theory and global simulation models to show that past and continued reduction of megabiota have and will continue to decrease ecosystem and biosphere functioning.

Over the past 35 years, annual tree mortality risk has increased in the moist tropical forests of Australia and is associated with increased atmospheric water stress.

The world’s tropical forests represent a terrestrial carbon sink, yet its size is uncertain. Espírito-Santo et al.characterize full Amazon disturbances combining forest inventories and remote sensing data, and use statistical modelling to quantify the Amazon aboveground forest carbon balance.

The Amazon rainforest is dominated by relatively few tree species, yet the degree to which this hyperdominance influences carbon cycling remains unknown. Here, the authors analyse 530 forest plots and show that ∼1% of species are responsible for 50% of the aboveground carbon storage and productivity.