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Unveiling African rainforest composition and vulnerability to global change

M. Réjou-Méchain 1 Frédéric Mortier 2, 3 Jean-François Bastin 1, 4, 2, 5 Guillaume Cornu 2, 3 Nicolas Barbier 1 Nicolas Bayol 6 Fabrice Bénédet 2, 3 Xavier Bry 7 Gilles Dauby 1 Vincent Deblauwe 8, 9 Jean-Louis Doucet 5 Charles Doumenge 2, 3 Adeline Fayolle 5 Claude Garcia 2, 3 Jean-Paul Kibambe Lubamba 10 Jean-Joël Loumeto 11 Alfred Ngomanda 12 Pierre Ploton 1 Bonaventure Sonké 13 Catherine Trottier 7 Ruppert Vimal 14 Olga Yongo 15 Raphaël Pélissier 1 Sylvie Gourlet-Fleury 2, 3
1 UMR AMAP - Botanique et Modélisation de l'Architecture des Plantes et des Végétations
2 UPR Forêts et Sociétés - Forêts et Sociétés
3 Cirad-ES - Département Environnements et Sociétés
4 Cirad-BIOS - Département Systèmes Biologiques
5 Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech [Gembloux]
6 FRM Ingénierie
7 IMAG - Institut Montpelliérain Alexander Grothendieck
8 University of California [Berkeley]
9 IITA - International Institute of Tropical Agriculture
10 ULK - Université Libre de Kinshasa
11 Université Marien Ngouabi
12 IRET - Institut de Recherche en Ecologie Tropicale
13 University of Yaoundé [Cameroun]
14 GEODE - Géographie de l'environnement
15 Université de Bangui
Abstract : Africa is forecasted to experience large and rapid climate change1 and population growth2 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.
Keywords : Climate-change impacts Community ecology Forest ecology Tropical ecology Africa
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Journal articles
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https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-03205277
Contributor : Yannick Brohard <>
Submitted on : Thursday, April 22, 2021 - 11:04:44 AM
Last modification on : Friday, April 23, 2021 - 3:38:22 AM

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INRAE | I3M_UMR5149 | AFRIQ | GEODE | UNIV-TLSE2 | CIRAD | MIPS | UNIV-MONTPELLIER | IMAG-MONTPELLIER | CNRS | B3ESTE | AMAP

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M. Réjou-Méchain, Frédéric Mortier, Jean-François Bastin, Guillaume Cornu, Nicolas Barbier, et al.. Unveiling African rainforest composition and vulnerability to global change. Nature, Nature Publishing Group, In press, ⟨10.1038/s41586-021-03483-6⟩. ⟨hal-03205277⟩

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