Journal Article

Unveiling African rainforest composition and vulnerability to global change

Kibambe Lubamba, Jean-Paul, Doumenge, Charles, Doucet, Jean-Louis, Ngomanda, Alfred, Barbier, Nicolas, Dauby, Gilles, Deblauwe, Vincent, Garcia, Claude, Yongo, Olga, Pélissier, Raphaël, Réjou-Méchain, Maxime, Bastin, Jean-François, Cornu, Guillaume, Loumeto, Jean-Joël, Bry, Xavier, Mortier, Frédéric, Gourlet-Fleury, Sylvie, Vimal, Ruppert, Bénédet, Fabrice, Fayolle, Adeline, Bayol, Nicolas, Ploton, Pierre, Sonké, Bonaventure, Trottier, Catherine

2021

Overview

Africa is forecasted to experience large and rapid climate change 1 and population growth 2 during the twenty-first century, which threatens the world’s second largest rainforest. Protecting and sustainably managing these African forests requires an increased understanding of their compositional heterogeneity, the environmental drivers of forest composition and their vulnerability to ongoing changes. Here, using a very large dataset of 6 million trees in more than 180,000 field plots, we jointly model the distribution in abundance of the most dominant tree taxa in central Africa, and produce continuous maps of the floristic and functional composition of central African forests. Our results show that the uncertainty in taxon-specific distributions averages out at the community level, and reveal highly deterministic assemblages. We uncover contrasting floristic and functional compositions across climates, soil types and anthropogenic gradients, with functional convergence among types of forest that are floristically dissimilar. Combining these spatial predictions with scenarios of climatic and anthropogenic global change suggests a high vulnerability of the northern and southern forest margins, the Atlantic forests and most forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where both climate and anthropogenic threats are expected to increase sharply by 2085. These results constitute key quantitative benchmarks for scientists and policymakers to shape transnational conservation and management strategies that aim to provide a sustainable future for central African forests. A large dataset of 6 million trees from 193 taxa is used to map the floristic and functional composition of central African forests and predict their vulnerability to climate change.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group,Nature
• Subject: 631/158/2454 / 631/158/853 / 704/158/2450 / 704/844/2739 / African rainforest / Anthropogenic factors / Anthropogenic gradients / Benchmarks / Biodiversity / Biodiversity and Ecology / Biologie végétale (sciences végétales, sylviculture, mycologie...) / Botanics / Climate / Climate and population / Climate change / Climate-change impacts / Community ecology / Conservation / Datasets / Ecology, environment / Ecosystems / Environmental Sciences / Environmental sciences & ecology / Floristic composition of forest / Forest composition / Forest ecology / Forest management / Forests / Functional composition of forest / Functionally gradient materials / Heterogeneity / Humanities and Social Sciences / Life Sciences / multidisciplinary / Phytobiology (plant sciences, forestry, mycology...) / Rainforests / Science / Science (multidisciplinary) / Sciences de l’environnement & écologie / Sciences du vivant / Soil types / Soils / Systematics, Phylogenetics and taxonomy / Tropical ecology / Vegetal Biology