Species-specific responses to climatic change in dry and wet tropical forests: is drought tolerance the clue?

Project description

Global climate change will have large and predictable effects on the amount and distribution of rainfall worldwide. Vegetation formations are expected to change drastically as a result of these changes in water availability. The performance of individual species and thus the competitive balance among species will be affected, resulting in shifts in species composition. The resulting community shift will depend on the species’ flexibility and resilience and will vary along a moisture gradient. In this project we address the differences of these effects between wet and dry tropical forest in Bolivia. We expect that drought tolerance of species is the clue in understanding which and how species will be affected by changes in water availability as a result of climate change. We also expect that species from dry forests are more resilient in this respect but that species from wet forest are highly affected.

For a large number of tree species in wet and dry tropical forest in Bolivia we will analyse their drought tolerance syndrome using field observations and greenhouse experiments. These species’ syndromes will be related to their local distribution along topographic gradients, and their regional distribution along a rainfall gradient using data from a large number of permanent sample plots all over Bolivia. We will distinguish different functional groups based on the drought tolerance and evaluate to what extent wet and dry forest differ in this respect. Finally we will use a newly developed plant- water model to predict changes in these functional groups in wet and dry forests in response to climate change scenarios. 

This information will drastically increase our understanding of functional ecology of these forests and their main tree species, and also the predictive power of the models describing the effects of climate change on plant performance and forest formation shifts. 

The drought tolerance syndrome data collected in this project are additional to a large screening program on functional ecology of wet and dry forest species. Together these data are unique in the tropical world and will be the basis of a large number of world-wide comparative studies on species performance in relation to environmental changes.

Top 

Project information
 

Top 

• Markesteijn, L. (2010) Drought tolerance of tropical tree species; Functional Traits, Trade-offs and Species Distribution. PhD thesis, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. ISBN 978-90-8585-534-7;  204 pp.With references, with summaries in English, Dutch and Spanish
• Markesteijn, L.; Poorter, L.; Yanguas-Fernández, E. (2008) La disponibilidad hídrica estacional y topográfica en un bosque seco y húmedo tropical y la variacion en la morfologia de las plántulas arbóreas. Revista Boliviana de Ecologia y Conservación Ambiental 24: 27 - 42.
• Poorter, L.; Markesteijn, L. (2008) Seedling traits determine drought tolerance of tropical tree species. Biotropica 40 (3). - p. 321 - 331.

Links

Bolivian Institute of Forest Research (IBIF): http://www.ibifbolivia.org.bo 

Pictures

Some impessions from a Bolivian tropical dry forest
Some impessions from a Bolivian tropical wet forest