Journal
NEW PHYTOLOGIST
Volume 234, Issue 5, Pages 1664-1677Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/nph.17995
Keywords
biomass; climate gradients; forests; tree size distribution; woody mortality; woody productivity
Categories
Funding
- ForestGEO network of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Tree size determines the interaction between trees and their environment, including climate change. Through analyzing 25 large-scale forest plots, it was found that in warmer forests, aboveground biomass and woody productivity are more broadly distributed with respect to tree size. In warmer and wetter forests, aboveground biomass and woody productivity are more right skewed, with a longer tail towards large trees. Small trees contribute more to productivity and mortality than to biomass.
Tree size shapes forest carbon dynamics and determines how trees interact with their environment, including a changing climate. Here, we conduct the first global analysis of among-site differences in how aboveground biomass stocks and fluxes are distributed with tree size. We analyzed repeat tree censuses from 25 large-scale (4-52 ha) forest plots spanning a broad climatic range over five continents to characterize how aboveground biomass, woody productivity, and woody mortality vary with tree diameter. We examined how the median, dispersion, and skewness of these size-related distributions vary with mean annual temperature and precipitation. In warmer forests, aboveground biomass, woody productivity, and woody mortality were more broadly distributed with respect to tree size. In warmer and wetter forests, aboveground biomass and woody productivity were more right skewed, with a long tail towards large trees. Small trees (1-10 cm diameter) contributed more to productivity and mortality than to biomass, highlighting the importance of including these trees in analyses of forest dynamics. Our findings provide an improved characterization of climate-driven forest differences in the size structure of aboveground biomass and dynamics of that biomass, as well as refined benchmarks for capturing climate influences in vegetation demographic models.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available