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For plants, elemental nutrients are important belowground resources that sustain growth and survival. To understand how tropical plant nutrient status responds to environmental variation, we asked whether concentrations of nutrients in root and leaf tissues track gradients in soil nutrient concentrations and if tissue nutrient concentrations respond independently or in concert to soil nutrient concentrations. We measured soil nutrient concentrations of rhizosphere soil and root and leaf tissue elemental concentrations of saplings from 14 Angiosperm families in montane tropical forest of Jianfengling, China. Using mixed-effects models, we modeled the nutrient concentration of plant tissues as a function of soil resources. Of fourteen elements measured, seven —nitrogen, boron, phosphorus, potassium, manganese, copper and zinc— increased in concentrations in root and leaf tissues with higher soil nutrient availability; two decreased —aluminum and carbon; three were invariant —magnesium, sulfur, and calcium; and two —sodium and iron— showed contrasting patterns between leaves and roots. Eight elements necessary to leaf physiological function, but also used in root functioning —nitrogen, boron, magnesium phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, calcium, manganese— were more concentrated in leaves than roots. Additionally, most elements showed tradeoffs in concentrations between roots and leaves. Plant lineage (i.e. family) explained very little of the variation about this overall trend. Overall, increases in tissue nutrient concentrations with soil fertility were subtle if present at all. Thus, we conclude that tissue nutrients of juvenile tropical trees have a high degree of elemental homeostasis with local-scale soil nutrient content in Jianfengling.

Leaf-level gas exchange data support the mechanistic understanding of plant fluxes of carbon and water. These fluxes inform our understanding of ecosystem function, are an important constraint on parameterization of terrestrial biosphere models, are necessary to understand the response of plants to global environmental change, and are integral to efforts to improve crop production. Collection of these data using gas analyzers can be both technically challenging and time consuming, and individual studies generally focus on a small range of species, restricted time periods, or limited geographic regions. The high value of these data is exemplified by the many publications that reuse and synthesize gas exchange data, however the lack of metadata and data reporting conventions make full and efficient use of these data difficult. Here we propose a reporting format for leaf-level gas exchange data and metadata to provide guidance to data contributors on how to store data in repositories to maximize their discoverability, facilitate their efficient reuse, and add value to individual datasets. For data users, the reporting format will better allow data repositories to optimize data search and extraction, and more readily integrate similar data into harmonized synthesis products. The reporting format specifies data table variable naming and unit conventions, as well as metadata characterizing experimental conditions and protocols. For common data types that were the focus of this initial version of the reporting format, i.e., survey measurements, dark respiration, carbon dioxide and light response curves, and parameters derived from those measurements, we took a further step of defining required additional data and metadata that would maximize the potential reuse of those data types. To aid data contributors and the development of data ingest tools by data repositories we provided a translation table comparing the outputs of common gas exchange instruments. Extensive consultation with data collectors, data users, instrument manufacturers, and data scientists was undertaken in order to ensure that the reporting format met community needs. The reporting format presented here is intended to form a foundation for future development that will incorporate additional data types and variables as gas exchange systems and measurement approaches advance in the future. The reporting format is published in the U.S. Department of Energy's ESS-DIVE data repository, with documentation and future development efforts being maintained in a version control system. publishedVersion

Legumes provide an essential service to ecosystems by capturing nitrogen from the atmosphere and delivering it to the soil, where it may then be available to other plants. However, this facilitation by legumes has not been widely studied in global tropical forests. Demographic data from 11 large forest plots (16–60 ha) ranging from 5.25° S to 29.25° N latitude show that within forests, leguminous trees have a larger effect on neighbor diversity than non-legumes. Where soil nitrogen is high, most legume species have higher neighbor diversity than non-legumes. Where soil nitrogen is low, most legumes have lower neighbor diversity than non-legumes. No facilitation effect on neighbor basal area was observed in either high or low soil N conditions. The legume–soil nitrogen positive feedback that promotes tree diversity has both theoretical implications for understanding species coexistence in diverse forests, and practical implications for the utilization of legumes in forest restoration., Xu et al. examine the effect of leguminous trees on neighbor diversity across 11 plots in tropical forests around the world, and find that in high soil nitrogen conditions, most legume species have higher neighbor diversity than non-legumes, and vice versa where soil nitrogen is low. Their results have practical implications for the utilization of legumes in forest restoration.

We investigated the relative and combined effect of topography and light environment on the recruitment of seedlings in a subtropical forest after snow damage to the canopy. The tree seedling community in an old-growth subtropical forest was monitored using 500 2 m × 2 m seedling plots at six-month intervals for 2 years. With a focus on recruitment following canopy damage, we related abiotic and biotic environmental variables to seedling dynamics, and we tested if significant topographic and light habitat associations were present for seedlings recruiting via a torus translation test. Then, we used variance partitioning to examine the relative effects of spatial, topographic and light variables on the temporal assemblages of seedlings. A total of 3047 seedlings from 58 species recruited in the first 2 years following snow damage. At the community level, increases in seedling abundance and richness were positively correlated with canopy openness and negatively correlated with elevation. At the species level, both pioneer and late-successional tree species had more recruits in high light environment than in low light environment. 84.3% of the recruiting seedlings were significantly associated to either light environment (35.7%), topography (26.5%) or both (22.1%). Despite this, at the plot level, spatial variables (PCNM) explained the majority of the variability in seedling composition over time. Our results suggest that snow damage to the canopy increases species richness and abundance via light-facilitated seedling recruitment, and that the composition of recruiting seedlings was largely spatially dependent. Topographic habitat filtering acts as a persistent force in determining the recruitment of seedlings and increases in strength with increased light-facilitated seedling recruitment. Our results highlight that, in this subtropical forest, both light requirement and topographic specialization interact over time to play a key role in promoting coexistence of tree species through selection of individuals at the seedling stage. We also suggest exploring the possibilities of management intervention to speed up the recovery of this forest.

The tree growth and mortality trade-off is well documented and plays a key role in forests by forming the basis of many ecosystem processes and contributing to tree species coexistence. One area that requires further understanding is how the growth-mortality trade-off is influenced by biotic and abiotic interactions in the forest. In this study, we used a 5-year interval of tree growth and mortality demographic data from a 9-ha forest dynamics plot in a temperate old-growth Chinese forest to address two questions, (1) What is the nature of the growth-mortality trade-off among species in this forest? (2) Are there differences between the responses of tree growth and mortality to local neighborhood variables, both biotic and abiotic? Specifically, do these responses vary among species and with tree size? For the first question, we hypothesized that, within species, mortality rate would be negatively correlated with growth rate, whereas among species it would be positively correlated. For the second question, we expected biotic and abiotic factors to both be important for tree mortality; but expected biotic factors to be more important than abiotic factors for tree growth. The responses of tree growth and mortality to local neighborhood variables, both biotic and abiotic, varied among species. Abiotic factors were more important than biotic factors for small trees; biotic variables were stable with tree size for both small and large trees. Our results showed that there were differences between the responses of tree growth and mortality to local neighborhood variables (i.e., biotic and abiotic) in this temperate forest community. The responses of tree mortality to local neighborhood variables strongly varied across species. Abiotic factors were only important for the growth of small trees. Biotic factors were stable with tree size for growth of small and large trees, but not for mortality. Mortality was negatively correlated with growth for large trees within species; growth-mortality trade-off among species was found to be more accentuated for small trees. The responses of tree mortality to local neighborhood variables differed strongly across species, whereas the responses of tree growth to local neighborhood variables varied among size classes. Tree growth and mortality is tightly correlated both within (negatively) and among species (positively), and their relationships are both size dependent in this temperate forest. Our findings highlight that differential responses of tree growth and mortality to local neighborhood variables continue to shape the forest community well after sapling establishment in this temperate forest community.

We studied lianas in a subtropical wet forest in Puerto Rico to understand how hurricane impacts and past human land-uses interact to affect liana dynamics over a 14-year period. We compared a high-intensity land-use area, where the forest that had been cleared, and used for subsistence agriculture before being abandoned in 1934 then regrew to a low-intensity land-use area, in which there had been only some selective experimental logging by the USDA Forest Service in the 1940s. Prior to our study, both areas were strongly affected by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and again damaged to a lesser degree by Hurricane Georges in 1998, increasing canopy openness and subsequently increasing tree stem densities. Between 2001 and 2015, changes in the light environment and the recovery of forest structure resulted in roughly a 50% reduction in tree stem densities in the high-intensity land-use area, as recruited saplings naturally thinned. In this area, liana abundance increased by 103%, liana biomass tripled, and occupancy of trees by lianas grew by nearly 50%. In the low-intensity land-use area, juvenile stem densities were stable, and resultantly liana abundance only increased by 33%, liana biomass rose 39%, and the occupancy of trees was constant. Liana flower and fruit production increased over the 14-year interval, and these increases were much greater in the high-intensity land-use quadrats. Results of this study do show how rapid forest tree successional dynamics coincide with liana increases, but the confounding of hurricane effects of disturbance at our site, prevent us from asserting that the increases in liana density and biomass can be attributed to the same causes as those in forests elsewhere in the Neotropics.

Synthesizing trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life remains a grand challenge for biodiversity science. Species traits are widely used in ecological and evolutionary science, and new data and methods have proliferated rapidly. Yet accessing and integrating disparate data sources remains a considerable challenge, slowing progress toward a global synthesis to integrate trait data across organisms. Trait science needs a vision for achieving global integration across all organisms. Here, we outline how the adoption of key Open Science principles—open data, open source and open methods—is transforming trait science, increasing transparency, democratizing access and accelerating global synthesis. To enhance widespread adoption of these principles, we introduce the Open Traits Network (OTN), a global, decentralized community welcoming all researchers and institutions pursuing the collaborative goal of standardizing and integrating trait data across organisms. We demonstrate how adherence to Open Science principles is key to the OTN community and outline five activities that can accelerate the synthesis of trait data across the Tree of Life, thereby facilitating rapid advances to address scientific inquiries and environmental issues. Lessons learned along the path to a global synthesis of trait data will provide a framework for addressing similarly complex data science and informatics challenges.

A growing body of research documents how the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) results in short-term changes in terrestrial environmental conditions, with the potential to drive ecosystem processes as the duration and severity of ENSO events increases with anthropogenic climate change. An ENSO positive phase results in anomalous patterns of rainfall and temperature throughout the tropics that coincide with leaf flush and increased fruit production in tropical forests worldwide. However, our understanding of possible mechanisms underlying this natural phenomenon is limited. Furthermore, flowering in tropical trees anticipates ENSO development, motivating the continued search for a global phenological cue for tropical angiosperm reproduction. We propose the solar energy flux hypothesis: that a physical energy influx in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and magnetosphere generated by a positive anomaly in the solar wind preceding ENSO development, cues tropical trees to increase allocation of resources to reproduction. We show that from 1994-2013, the solar wind energy flux into the Earth’s magnetosphere (Ein) is more strongly correlated with the number of trees in fruit or flower in a Puerto Rican wet forest than the Niño 3.4 climate index, despite Niño 3.4 being a previously identified driver of interannual increases in reproduction. We discuss the idea that changes in the global magnetosphere and thermosphere conditions via solar wind-effects on global atmospheric circulation, principally a weaker Walker circulation, cue interannual increases tropical tree reproduction. This may be a mechanism that synchronizes the reproductive output of the tropical trees to changes in environmental conditions that coincide with ENSO. Thus, space weather patterns may help explain terrestrial biological phenomena that occur at quasi-decadal scales.

Mangrove forests growing at the poleward edges of their geographic distribution are occasionally subject to freezing (&lt, 0 °C) and cold wave (&gt, 0 °C) events. Cold wave effects on mangrove trees are well documented and adaptation to cold stress has been reported for local mangrove populations in the North Atlantic. However, there is less understanding of effects of cold waves on mangroves in the northern Pacific, especially at the regional scale. Moreover, it is unclear if cold tolerant mangrove species of North Asia display variation in resistance to cold temperatures across their geographic distribution. Using a cold wave event that occurred in January 2021, we evaluated the effects of low temperatures on vegetation index (VI) change (relative to a recent five-year baseline) for mangrove forests dominated by Kandelia obovata (Rhizophoraceae) and Avicennia marina (Acanthaceaee) at the northern edge of their geographical range. We used two VIs derived from Sentinel-2 imagery as indicators for canopy health: the normalized difference infrared index (NDII) and the chlorophyll red-edge index (ChlRE), which reflect forest canopy water content and chlorophyll concentration, respectively. We isolated the cold wave effects on the forest canopy from phenology (i.e., cold wave induced deviation from a five-year baseline) and used multiple linear regression to identify significant climatic predictors for the response of mangrove forest canopy VI change to low temperatures. For areas where the cold wave resulted in temperatures &lt, 10 °C, immediate decreases in both VIs were observed, and the VI difference relative to the baseline was generally greater at 30-days after the cold wave than when temperatures initially recovered to baseline values, showing a slight delay in VI response to cold wave-induced canopy damage. Furthermore, the two VIs did not respond consistently suggesting that cold-temperature induced changes in mangrove canopy chlorophyll and water content are affected independently or subject to differing physiological controls. Our results confirm that local baseline (i.e., recent past) climate predicts canopy resistance to cold wave damage across K. obovata stands in the northern Pacific, and in congruence with findings from New World mangroves, they imply geographic variation in mangrove leaf physiological resistance to cold for Northern Pacific mangroves.

The net primary productivity (NPP) of tropical forests is a key part of the global carbon cycle. Numerous studies have estimated tropical forest NPP, yet most of them focus on how annual NPP dynamics vary over several years. Little is known about how NPP responds to long-term climatic variation at the monthly or seasonal scales. We estimated NPP at three-month intervals from 2009 to 2017 for a tropical seasonal rainforest in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China using data from >2000 dendrometer bands and litter fall traps within a 20-ha permanent forest dynamics plot. We asked which climatic factor has the greatest effect on forest NPP at the sub annual scale, and how the relationships vary with seasonality. Calculations showed that NPP ranged from 12 to 20 t ha−1 yr−1, and that forest productivity showed a slight, but insignificant increase from 2009 to 2017. NPP was significantly higher in the wet season than that in the dry season and was significantly related to precipitation only when all data were concerned. During the dry season, precipitation had a significant positive influence on NPP, but no effect during the wet season. We further identified that there was a threshold effect of precipitation on NPP. Specifically, productivity increased more rapidly when monthly precipitation below 229 mm. In summary, we conclude that periods of low rainfall strongly regulate the productivity in this tropical seasonal rainforest which could guide the management design of water use efficiency in tree based land-use system, like agroforestry ecosystems.

Functional traits are increasingly used to understand the ecology of plants and to predict their responses to global changes. Unfortunately, trait data are unavailable for the majority of plant species. The lack of trait data is especially prevalent for hard-to-measure traits and for tropical plant species, potentially owing to the many inherent difficulties of working with species in remote, hyperdiverse rainforest systems. The living collections of botanic gardens provide convenient access to large numbers of tropical plant species and can potentially be used to quickly augment trait databases and advance our understanding of species' responses to climate change. In this review, we quantitatively assess the availability of trait data for tropical versus temperate species, the diversity of species available for sampling in several exemplar tropical botanic gardens and the validity of garden-based leaf and root trait measurements. Our analyses support the contention that the living collections of botanic gardens are a valuable scientific resource that can contribute significantly to research on plant functional ecology and conservation. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene’.

As cyclonic wind storms (hurricanes and typhoons) increase in frequency and intensity with climate change, it is important to understand their effects on the populations and communities of tropical trees they impact. Using tree demographic data from four large, tropical forest dynamics plots that differ in cyclonic storm frequency, we compare tree population and community dynamics. Additionally, we assess the effect of cyclonic storms on three functional traits, specific leaf area, wood density, and tree height of the dynamic tree assemblages. Mortality, growth and recruitment rates and the intrinsic rates of population growth of species differed across the plots, and were most dynamic, especially for stems 1&ndash, 2 cm in diameter, at the plot which had an intermediate level of cyclonic storm frequency. Functional assemblages of species had the greatest degree of temporal variation in relation to disturbance, as measured by the change in functional divergence for the two plots with more intermediate cyclonic storm recurrence. Therefore, cyclonic storms affecting these plots generally have a greater effect on forest composition and dynamism than comparable cyclonic storms do on the plot which experiences cyclonic storms more frequently. Thus, we provide some evidence that community-wide demographic resistance to cyclonic storms is generally lower at an intermediate frequency of storms. While cyclonic storm strength and timing are important determinants of the within forest variation in tree dynamics and functional trait assemblages, we also show that cyclonic storm timing and frequency shapes tropical forest dynamics and functional composition across forests. We conclude that, over a given time interval, sites with intermediate levels of damaging cyclonic wind disturbance express a greater potential for life-history variation in the forest community, when compared to sites with less or more frequent disturbance.