Individual tree damage dominates mortality risk factors across six tropical forests

How do trees fail in intraspecific competition? A test for the roles of non-structural carbohydrates and stoichiometries in Pinus massoniana

Competition is ubiquitous and an important driver of tree mortality. Non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs, including soluble sugars and starch) and C-N-P stoichiometries are affected by the competitive status of trees and, in turn, physiologically determine tree growth and survival in competition. However, the physiological mechanisms behind tree mortality caused by intraspecific competition remain unclear. Here, we ask how the performance (growth vigour) of trees in intraspecific competition relates to NSC and C-N-P stoichiometry traits. Through the field surveys at neighbourhood levels, we demonstrated that competition is responsible for tree mortality in an even-aged Pinus massoniana forest. The whole NSCs and C-N-P stoichiometries of trees in different growth vigour classes (i.e., flourishing, moderate, and dying) were then analysed to elucidate how trees fail in competition. We found that (1) the concentrations of NSCs and their components in stems, coarse roots and fine roots were constant across tree growth vigour classes, but were significantly lower in the leaves, twigs and branches of moderate and dying trees than those of flourishing trees, and (2) the C, N and P concentration and their respective ratios were constant in all the tissues across tree growth vigour classes, but the nitrogen stoichiometric homeostasis index (HN) of flourishing trees was significantly higher than that of moderate and dying trees. The results demonstrated that both carbohydrate deficiency and low stoichiometric homeostasis are potential physiological drivers underlying tree mortality caused by intraspecific competition. This study also emphasizes the importance of considering stoichiometric homeostasis in research on tree competition and forest dynamics.

Composite likelihood inference for space-time point processes

The dynamics of a rain forest is extremely complex involving births, deaths, and growth of trees with complex interactions between trees, animals, climate, and environment. We consider the patterns of recruits (new trees) and dead trees between rain forest censuses. For a current census, we specify regression models for the conditional intensity of recruits and the conditional probabilities of death given the current trees and spatial covariates. We estimate regression parameters using conditional composite likelihood functions that only involve the conditional first order properties of the data. When constructing assumption lean estimators of covariance matrices of parameter estimates, we only need mild assumptions of decaying conditional correlations in space, while assumptions regarding correlations over time are avoided by exploiting conditional centering of composite likelihood score functions. Time series of point patterns from rain forest censuses are quite short, while each point pattern covers a fairly big spatial region. To obtain asymptotic results, we therefore use a central limit theorem for the fixed timespan-increasing spatial domain asymptotic setting. This also allows us to handle the challenge of using stochastic covariates constructed from past point patterns. Conveniently, it suffices to impose weak dependence assumptions on the innovations of the space-time process. We investigate the proposed methodology by simulation studies and an application to rain forest data.

Tracking tree demography and forest dynamics at scale using remote sensing

Capturing how tree growth and survival vary through space and time is critical to understanding the structure and dynamics of tree-dominated ecosystems. However, characterising demographic processes at scale is inherently challenging, as trees are slow-growing, long-lived and cover vast expanses of land. We used repeat airborne laser scanning data acquired across 25 km2 of semi-arid, old-growth temperate woodland in Western Australia to track the height growth, crown expansion and mortality of 42 213 individual trees over 9 yr. We found that demographic rates are constrained by a combination of tree size, competition and topography. After initially investing in height growth, trees progressively shifted to crown expansion as they grew larger, while mortality risk decreased considerably with size. Across the landscape, both tree growth and survival increased with topographic wetness, resulting in vegetation patterns that are strongly spatially structured. Moreover, biomass gains from woody growth generally outpaced losses from mortality, suggesting these old-growth woodlands remain a net carbon sink in the absence of wildfires. Our study sheds new light on the processes that shape the dynamics and spatial structure of semi-arid woody ecosystems and provides a roadmap for using emerging remote sensing technologies to track tree demography at scale.

Modeling the horizontal distribution of tree crown biomass from terrestrial laser scanning data

Tree crown biomass is rarely assessed individually in forest monitoring, but when it is to be reported, standard conversion factors are commonly used for predicting crown biomass as a function of stem biomass. Further, in the conventional methods, the predicted total tree biomass is assigned exclusively to the stem position. In reality, however, tree and in particular crown biomass is spatially distributed over the entire crown projection area. In this study, we investigated the "Horizontal Biomass Distribution (HBD)" model, which serves to depict this biomass as a spatial distribution over the crown projection area: here, the individual tree crown biomass is modeled as a continuous distribution within the area defined by the crown projection. We examined two empirical HBD prediction models: (1) Weibull distribution; and (2) Segmented polynomial regression; which describe the biomass contained up to a given crown radius on the horizontal projection of individual trees, i.e., spatial distribution of crown biomass as a function of the horizontal distance from the stem. The approach was demonstrated using terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) on a sample of 33 urban trees from eight species. We found that (1) the segmented polynomial regression model revealed better performance in defining the HBD for various tree species; (2) a certain variability in HBD patterns was observed between the sample trees, with the variability being more pronounced between species groups than within species; and (3) the methodological approaches using TLS proxies are suitable and convenient to non-destructively assess the HBD, which would be otherwise impractical by direct measurements.

A Growth-Survival Trade-Off Along an Elevation Gradient Is Altered by Earthquake Disturbance in a Monodominant Southern Beech Forest

Tree growth-survival relationships link two demographic processes that individually dictate the composition, structure and functioning of forest ecosystems. While these relationships vary intra-specifically, it remains unclear how this reflects environmental variation and disturbance. We examined the influence of a 700-m elevation gradient and an Mw = 6.7 earthquake on intra-specific variability in growth-survival relationships. We expected that survival models that incorporated recent growth would be better supported than those only using other factors known to influence tree survival. We used a permanent plot network that representatively sampled a monodominant Nothofagus forest in New Zealand's Southern Alps in 1974 and that was remeasured seven times through to 2009. The relationships were assessed using pre-earthquake growth and survival, pre-earthquake growth and post-earthquake survival (0-5 years post-earthquake), and post-earthquake growth and survival (5+ years post-earthquake). Survival was related to growth of 4504 trees on 216 plots using Bayesian modelling. We hypothesised there would be a positive, logistic relationship between growth and survival. Pre-earthquake, we found a positive, logarithmic growth-survival relationship at all elevations. At higher elevations, trees grew more slowly but had higher survival than trees at lower elevations, supporting our hypothesised demographic trade-off with elevation. The earthquake altered growth-survival relationships from those found pre-earthquake and 0-5 years post-earthquake survival held little relationship with growth. A strong, logarithmic growth-survival relationship developed 5+ years post-earthquake because of enhanced survival of fast-growing trees yet low survival of slow-growing trees. Synthesis. Our findings demonstrate a trend in growth-survival relationships along an elevation gradient. If we assume a gradual climate warming is the equivalent of a forest stand shifting to a lower elevation, then data from our pre-earthquake period suggest that tree growth-survival relationships at any elevation could adjust to faster growth and lower survival. We also show how these novel growth-survival relationships could be altered by periodic disturbance.

Demographic trade-offs and functional shifts in a hurricane-impacted tropical forest

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Understanding shifts in the demographic and functional composition of forests after major natural disturbances has become increasingly relevant given the accelerating rates of climate change and elevated frequency of natural disturbances. Although plant demographic strategies are often described across a slow-fast continuum, severe and frequent disturbance events influencing demographic processes may alter the demographic trade-offs and the functional composition of forests. We examined demographic trade-offs and the shifts in functional traits in a hurricane-disturbed forest using long-term data from the Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot (LFPD) in Puerto Rico.

METHODS

We analysed information on growth, survival, seed rain and seedling recruitment for 30 woody species in the LFDP. In addition, we compiled data on leaf, seed and wood functional traits that capture the main ecological strategies for plants. We used this information to identify the main axes of demographic variation for this forest community and evaluate shifts in community-weighted means for traits from 2000 to 2016.

KEY RESULTS

The previously identified growth-survival trade-off was not observed. Instead, we identified a fecundity-growth trade-off and an axis representing seedling-to-adult survival. Both axes formed dimensions independent of resprouting ability. Also, changes in tree species composition during the post-hurricane period reflected a directional shift from seedling and tree communities dominated by acquisitive towards conservative leaf economics traits and large seed mass. Wood specific gravity, however, did not show significant directional changes over time.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study demonstrates that tree demographic strategies coping with frequent storms and hurricane disturbances deviate from strategies typically observed in undisturbed forests, yet the shifts in functional composition still conform to the expected changes from acquisitive to conservative resource-uptake strategies expected over succession. In the face of increased rates of natural and anthropogenic disturbance in tropical regions, our results anticipate shifts in species demographic trade-offs and different functional dimensions.

Damage to living trees contributes to almost half of the biomass losses in tropical forests

Accurate estimates of forest biomass stocks and fluxes are needed to quantify global carbon budgets and assess the response of forests to climate change. However, most forest inventories consider tree mortality as the only aboveground biomass (AGB) loss without accounting for losses via damage to living trees: branchfall, trunk breakage, and wood decay. Here, we use ~151,000 annual records of tree survival and structural completeness to compare AGB loss via damage to living trees to total AGB loss (mortality + damage) in seven tropical forests widely distributed across environmental conditions. We find that 42% (3.62 Mg ha^-1  year^-1 ; 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.36-5.25) of total AGB loss (8.72 Mg ha^-1  year^-1 ; CI 5.57-12.86) is due to damage to living trees. Total AGB loss was highly variable among forests, but these differences were mainly caused by site variability in damage-related AGB losses rather than by mortality-related AGB losses. We show that conventional forest inventories overestimate stand-level AGB stocks by 4% (1%-17% range across forests) because assume structurally complete trees, underestimate total AGB loss by 29% (6%-57% range across forests) due to overlooked damage-related AGB losses, and overestimate AGB loss via mortality by 22% (7%-80% range across forests) because of the assumption that trees are undamaged before dying. Our results indicate that forest carbon fluxes are higher than previously thought. Damage on living trees is an underappreciated component of the forest carbon cycle that is likely to become even more important as the frequency and severity of forest disturbances increase.

Multiscale predictors of small tree survival across a heterogeneous tropical landscape

Uncertainties about controls on tree mortality make forest responses to land-use and climate change difficult to predict. We tracked biomass of tree functional groups in tropical forest inventories across Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and with random forests we ranked 86 potential predictors of small tree survival (young or mature stems 2.5-12.6 cm diameter at breast height). Forests span dry to cloud forests, range in age, geology and past land use and experienced severe drought and storms. When excluding species as a predictor, top predictors are tree crown ratio and height, two to three species traits and stand to regional factors reflecting local disturbance and the system state (widespread recovery, drought, hurricanes). Native species, and species with denser wood, taller maximum height, or medium typical height survive longer, but short trees and species survive hurricanes better. Trees survive longer in older stands and with less disturbed canopies, harsher geoclimates (dry, edaphically dry, e.g., serpentine substrates, and highest-elevation cloud forest), or in intervals removed from hurricanes. Satellite image phenology and bands, even from past decades, are top predictors, being sensitive to vegetation type and disturbance. Covariation between stand-level species traits and geoclimate, disturbance and neighboring species types may explain why most neighbor variables, including introduced vs. native species, had low or no importance, despite univariate correlations with survival. As forests recovered from a hurricane in 1998 and earlier deforestation, small trees of introduced species, which on average have lighter wood, died at twice the rate of natives. After hurricanes in 2017, the total biomass of trees ≥12.7 cm dbh of the introduced species Spathodea campanulata spiked, suggesting that more frequent hurricanes might perpetuate this light-wooded species commonness. If hurricane recovery favors light-wooded species while drought favors others, climate change influences on forest composition and ecosystem services may depend on the frequency and severity of extreme climate events.

Dynamic Energy Budget models: fertile ground for understanding resource allocation in plants in a changing world

Climate change is having dramatic effects on the diversity and distribution of species. Many of these effects are mediated by how an organism's physiological patterns of resource allocation translate into fitness through effects on growth, survival and reproduction. Empirically, resource allocation is challenging to measure directly and so has often been approached using mathematical models, such as Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models. The fact that all plants require a very similar set of exogenous resources, namely light, water and nutrients, integrates well with the DEB framework in which a small number of variables and processes linked through pathways represent an organism's state as it changes through time. Most DEB theory has been developed in reference to animals and microorganisms. However, terrestrial vascular plants differ from these organisms in fundamental ways that make resource allocation, and the trade-offs and feedbacks arising from it, particularly fundamental to their life histories, but also challenging to represent using existing DEB theory. Here, we describe key features of the anatomy, morphology, physiology, biochemistry, and ecology of terrestrial vascular plants that should be considered in the development of a generic DEB model for plants. We then describe possible approaches to doing so using existing DEB theory and point out features that may require significant development for DEB theory to accommodate them. We end by presenting a generic DEB model for plants that accounts for many of these key features and describing gaps that would need to be addressed for DEB theory to predict the responses of plants to climate change. DEB models offer a powerful and generalizable framework for modelling resource allocation in terrestrial vascular plants, and our review contributes a framework for expansion and development of DEB theory to address how plants respond to anthropogenic change.

Tree crown damage and its effects on forest carbon cycling in a tropical forest

Crown damage can account for over 23% of canopy biomass turnover in tropical forests and is a strong predictor of tree mortality; yet, it is not typically represented in vegetation models. We incorporate crown damage into the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES), to evaluate how lags between damage and tree recovery or death alter demographic rates and patterns of carbon turnover. We represent crown damage as a reduction in a tree's crown area and leaf and branch biomass, and allow associated variation in the ratio of aboveground to belowground plant tissue. We compare simulations with crown damage to simulations with equivalent instant increases in mortality and benchmark results against data from Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama. In FATES, crown damage causes decreases in growth rates that match observations from BCI. Crown damage leads to increases in carbon starvation mortality in FATES, but only in configurations with high root respiration and decreases in carbon storage following damage. Crown damage also alters competitive dynamics, as plant functional types that can recover from crown damage outcompete those that cannot. This is a first exploration of the trade-off between the additional complexity of the novel crown damage module and improved predictive capabilities. At BCI, a tropical forest that does not experience high levels of disturbance, both the crown damage simulations and simulations with equivalent increases in mortality does a reasonable job of capturing observations. The crown damage module provides functionality for exploring dynamics in forests with more extreme disturbances such as cyclones and for capturing the synergistic effects of disturbances that overlap in space and time.

Tropical tree mortality has increased with rising atmospheric water stress

Evidence exists that tree mortality is accelerating in some regions of the tropics^1,2, with profound consequences for the future of the tropical carbon sink and the global anthropogenic carbon budget left to limit peak global warming below 2 °C. However, the mechanisms that may be driving such mortality changes and whether particular species are especially vulnerable remain unclear^3-8. Here we analyse a 49-year record of tree dynamics from 24 old-growth forest plots encompassing a broad climatic gradient across the Australian moist tropics and find that annual tree mortality risk has, on average, doubled across all plots and species over the last 35 years, indicating a potential halving in life expectancy and carbon residence time. Associated losses in biomass were not offset by gains from growth and recruitment. Plots in less moist local climates presented higher average mortality risk, but local mean climate did not predict the pace of temporal increase in mortality risk. Species varied in the trajectories of their mortality risk, with the highest average risk found nearer to the upper end of the atmospheric vapour pressure deficit niches of species. A long-term increase in vapour pressure deficit was evident across the region, suggesting that thresholds involving atmospheric water stress, driven by global warming, may be a primary cause of increasing tree mortality in moist tropical forests.

Analyses of three-dimensional species associations reveal departures from neutrality in a tropical forest

The study of community spatial structure is central to understanding diversity patterns over space and species co-occurrence at local scales. While most analytical approaches consider horizontal and vertical dimensions separately, in this study we introduce a three-dimensional spatial analysis that simultaneously includes horizontal and vertical species associations. Using tree census data (2000 to 2016) and allometries from the Luquillo forest plot in Puerto Rico, we show that spatial organization becomes less random over time as the forest recovered from land-use legacy effects and hurricane disturbance. Tree species vertical segregation is predominant in the forest with almost all species that co-occur in the horizontal plane avoiding each other in the vertical dimension. Horizontal segregation is less common than vertical, while three-dimensional aggregation (a proxy for direct tree competition) is the least frequent type of spatial association. Furthermore, dominant species are involved in more non-random spatial associations, implying that species co-occurrence is facilitated by species segregation in space. This novel three-dimensional analysis allowed us to identify and quantify tree species spatial distributions, how interspecific competition was reduced through forest structure, and how it changed over time after disturbance, in ways not detectable from two-dimensional analyses alone.