Drier tropical forests are susceptible to functional changes in response to a long-term drought.

Climatic changes have profound effects on the distribution of biodiversity, but untangling the links between climatic change and ecosystem functioning is challenging, particularly in high diversity systems such as tropical forests. Tropical forests may also show different responses to a changing climate, with baseline climatic conditions potentially inducing differences in the strength and timing of responses to droughts. Trait-based approaches provide an opportunity to link functional composition, ecosystem function and environmental changes. We demonstrate the power of such approaches by presenting a novel analysis of long-term responses of different tropical forest to climatic changes along a rainfall gradient. We explore how key ecosystem's biogeochemical properties have shifted over time as a consequence of multi-decadal drying. Notably, we find that drier tropical forests have increased their deciduous species abundance and generally changed more functionally than forests growing in wetter conditions, suggesting an enhanced ability to adapt ecologically to a drying environment.

Long-term droughts may drive drier tropical forests towards increased functional, taxonomic and phylogenetic homogeneity.

Tropical ecosystems adapted to high water availability may be highly impacted by climatic changes that increase soil and atmospheric moisture deficits. Many tropical regions are experiencing significant changes in climatic conditions, which may induce strong shifts in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity of forest communities. However, it remains unclear if and to what extent tropical forests are shifting in these facets of diversity along climatic gradients in response to climate change. Here, we show that changes in climate affected all three facets of diversity in West Africa in recent decades. Taxonomic and functional diversity increased in wetter forests but tended to decrease in forests with drier climate. Phylogenetic diversity showed a large decrease along a wet-dry climatic gradient. Notably, we find that all three facets of diversity tended to be higher in wetter forests. Drier forests showed functional, taxonomic and phylogenetic homogenization. Understanding how different facets of diversity respond to a changing environment across climatic gradients is essential for effective long-term conservation of tropical forest ecosystems.

Leaf-level photosynthetic capacity dynamics in relation to soil and foliar nutrients along forest-savanna boundaries in Ghana and Brazil.

Forest-savanna boundaries extend across large parts of the tropics but the variability of photosynthetic capacity in relation to soil and foliar nutrients across these transition zones is poorly understood. For this reason, we compared photosynthetic capacity (maximum rate of carboxylation of Rubisco at 25 C° (Vcmax25), leaf mass, nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) per unit leaf area (LMA, Narea, Parea and Karea, respectively), in relation to respective soil nutrients from 89 species at seven sites along forest-savanna ecotones in Ghana and Brazil. Contrary to our expectations, edaphic conditions were not reflected in foliar nutrient concentrations but LMA was slightly higher in lower fertility soils. Overall, each vegetation type within the ecotones demonstrated idiosyncratic and generally weak relationships between Vcmax25 and Narea, Parea and Karea. Species varied significantly in their Vcmax25 ↔ Narea relationship due to reduced investment of total Narea in photosynthetic machinery with increasing LMA. We suggest that studied species in the forest-savanna ecotones do not maximize Vcmax25 per given total Narea due to adaptation to intermittent water availability. Our findings have implications for global modeling of Vcmax25 and forest-savanna ecotone productivity.