Prévision du changement de la biodiversité

Future ecosystems will be shaped by forest capacity to recover from stress and adapt to accelerating change. Forests provide the structural foundation for much of the planet’s biodiversity, and they deliver the resources needed to maintain food webs and many of the services on which humans depend. This project initiated a global effort to understand the changes happening now and their implications for biodiversity. The initiative now engages over 100 collaborators from Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. Our early results have quantified the basic biogeography of fruit, seed, and nut production, how it is controlled by the condition of individual trees, and how those responses translate to landscape and continental shifts. Foundational discoveries include i) fruit, seed, and nut production is > 200 times higher in the wet tropics than high latitudes, driven by a 100-fold difference in seeds per tree of a given size, ii) fruit production declines as trees mature, countering the long-standing belief that it continues to increase allometrically, iii) globally, seed production declines with high fertility levels, also counter to expectation, and iv) angiosperms have higher fecundity than gymnosperms, potentially contributing to their disproportionate success since they evolved in the Cretaceous.