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A global research network monitoring the Amazon for 30 years reports in this study that tree size increased by 3% each decade.

Inventory data from more than 1 million trees across African, Amazonian and Southeast Asian tropical forests suggests that, despite their high diversity, just 1,053 species, representing a consistent ~2.2% of tropical tree species in each region, constitute half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees.

An analysis of tree survival data from forest sites worldwide shows that in the tropics, rare tree species experience stronger stabilizing density dependence than common species, wheras no correlation of stabilizing density dependence and abundance exists in the temperate zone.

Examining drivers of the latitudinal biodiversity gradient in a global database of local tree species richness, the authors show that co-limitation by multiple environmental and anthropogenic factors causes steeper increases in richness with latitude in tropical versus temperate and boreal zones.

Analysing data on the relative abundance of basal area of ectomycorrhizal trees from lowland tropical forests, the authors show that their distribution and abundance are independent of soil quality.

Wood density is a key control on tree biomass, and understanding its spatial variation improves estimates of forest carbon stock. Sullivan et al. measure >900 forest plots to quantify wood density and produce high resolution maps of its variation across South American tropical forests.

Biogeochemical analysis of a chronosequence of secondary forest succession in lowland Central Africa suggests that calcium becomes an increasingly scarce and potentially limiting resource with stand age and ecosystem calcium storage shifts from soil to woody biomass.

Between around 5,000 to 2,000 years ago, a drying climate in the vast peatlands of the Congo Basin triggered peat decomposition and carbon release to the atmosphere, implying that this region may be vulnerable to future climate change.

Unlike Amazonian forests, African forests have maintained their carbon sink until recently but by 2030 the African carbon sink will have shrunk by 14 per cent and the Amazonian sink will reach almost zero.

Data from a variety of sources—including satellite, climate and soil data, as well as field-collected information on plant traits—are pooled and analysed to map the functional diversity of tropical forest canopies globally.

Using demographic data for 1,111 tree species across ten tropical forests, the authors test the generality of the growth–mortality trade-off, finding that it holds in undisturbed but not disturbed forests.

Field surveys suggest peatlands in the central Congo Basin are globally significant carbon stocks, storing approximately 28% of the world’s tropical peat carbon.

The authors analyse tree responses to an extreme heat and drought event across South America to understand long-term climate resistance. While no more sensitive to this than previous lesser events, forests in drier climates showed the greatest impacts and thus vulnerability to climate extremes.

Nowhere is biomass burning more abundant than on the African continent, but the biogeochemical impacts on forests are poorly understood. Here the authors show that biomass burning leads to high phosphorus deposition in the Congo basin, which scales with forest age as a result of increasing canopy complexity.

The aboveground carbon stock of a montane African forest network is comparable to that of a lowland African forest network and two-thirds higher than default values for these montane forests.

Capacity for carbon capture and storage in forests may not be monolithic but instead a function of complex dynamics of forest strata and age. The smaller trees that make up the understory in African tropical forests store their carbon longer as compared to sub-canopy and canopy trees and they represent a disproportionately large share of the carbon sink, in spite of their small size.

This study reports data from a network of long-term monitoring plots across African tropical forests, which finds that above-ground carbon storage in live trees increased by 0.63 Mg C ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ between 1968 and 2007. The data is extrapolated to unmeasured forest components, and by scaling to the continent, a total increase in carbon storage in African tropical forest trees of 0.34 Pg C yr⁻¹ is estimated. These results provide evidence that increasing carbon storage in old-growth forests is a pan-tropical phenomenon.

Analysis of changes in functional groups of species and potential drivers of environmental change for protected areas across the world’s major tropical regions reveals large variation between reserves that have been effective and those experiencing an erosion of biodiversity, and shows that environmental changes immediately outside reserves are nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate.

A global analysis shows that for most tree species the largest trees are the fastest-growing trees, a finding that resolves conflicting assumptions about tree growth and that has implications for understanding forest carbon dynamics, resource allocation trade-offs within trees and plant senescence.