title: An imperative need for global change research in tropical forests.
abstract: Tropical forests play a crucial role in regulating regional and global climate dynamics, and model projections suggest that rapid climate change may result in forest dieback or savannization. However, these predictions are largely based on results from leaf-level studies. How tropical forests respond and feedback to climate change is largely unknown at the ecosystem level. Several complementary approaches have been used to evaluate the effects of climate change on tropical forests, but the results are conflicting, largely due to confounding effects of multiple factors. Although altered precipitation and nitrogen deposition experiments have been conducted in tropical forests, large-scale warming and elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) manipulations are completely lacking, leaving many hypotheses and model predictions untested. Ecosystem-scale experiments to manipulate temperature and CO2 concentration individually or in combination are thus urgently needed to examine their main and interactive effects on tropical forests. Such experiments will provide indispensable data and help gain essential knowledge on biogeochemical, hydrological and biophysical responses and feedbacks of tropical forests to climate change. These datasets can also inform regional and global models for predicting future states of tropical forests and climate systems. The success of such large-scale experiments in natural tropical forests will require an international framework to coordinate collaboration so as to meet the challenges in cost, technological infrastructure and scientific endeavor.
authors.affiliation: Coastal Ecosystems Research Station of Yangtze River Estuary, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, The Institute of Biodiversity Science, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433, China.
authors.forename: Xuhui
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Yuling
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.forename: Lingyan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Yiqi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Luo
mesh_terms: D057486:Carbon Cycle; D057231:Climate Change; D017753:Ecosystem; D012106:Research; D014197:Trees / Q000502:physiology*; D014329:Tropical Climate
keywords: carbon; climate change; elevated CO2; energy; tropical forests; warming; water