Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Tropical forests modify the conditions they depend on through feedbacks at different spatial scales. These feedbacks shape the hysteresis (history-dependence) of tropical forests, thus controlling their resilience to deforestation and response to climate change. Here, we determine the emergent hysteresis from local-scale tipping points and regional-scale forest-rainfall feedbacks across the tropics under the recent climate and a severe climate-change scenario. By integrating remote sensing, a global hydrological model, and detailed atmospheric moisture tracking simulations, we find that forest-rainfall feedback expands the geographic range of possible forest distributions, especially in the Amazon. The Amazon forest could partially recover from complete deforestation, but may lose that resilience later this century. The Congo forest currently lacks resilience, but is predicted to gain it under climate change, whereas forests in Australasia are resilient under both current and future climates. Our results show how tropical forests shape their own distributions and create the climatic conditions that enable them.
Source: Nature Communications
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDGs: Life on land, Climate action
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $5,380
Awards: G134200113, Governing atmospheric water flows: integrative forest-agriculture solutions for securing rainfall for crop production in Africa, Ripples of Resilience: navigating cross-scale SDG interactions of water, land, and climate within planetary boundaries, G712881263, Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene (ERA) Integrating non-linear biophysical and social determinants of Earth-system stability for global sustainability through a novel community modelling platform
OpenAlex ID: W3089791600