We want to develop an integrated network of permanent plots in Brazil that can monitor forest biodiversity and carbon fluxes through the 21st century in which its natural systems will be increasingly stressed and challenged by climate change. This project will take an important step towards this ambitious goal. Amazonia is vast, so conducting even basic research is challenging. Monitoring ecosystems here requires scientific leadership, vision, and large networks in which researchers apply standardised techniques on-the-ground at many locations. Training must be integrated into the research process to create capacity and assure long-term continuity of monitoring. This project will build on the successes of the pan-Amazon forest monitoring network (RAINFOR- Rede Amazônica de Inventários Florestais- led by Phillips) by linking with the leading pan-Brazilian biodiversity monitoring network (PPBio). RAINFOR works with 400 permanent plots and has made several major scientific discoveries in Amazonia and developed unique software ("ForestPlots.net") to help tropical partners analyse plot data. But due to poor plot coverage in Brazil, RAINFOR cannot yet provide good estimates of forest carbon balance and dynamics fluxes in Brazil. Meanwhile, PPBio has developed a unique biodiversity assessment protocol and applied it across Brazil with more than 30 institutional partners. However few plots - almost all from one site - have been re-measured for vegetation change. The proposal therefore takes a step towards addressing the needs of both partners. Together we will (1) share techniques and train local participants, (2) recensus 30 PPBio plots in a huge spatial gap, and (3) train young scientists to process, share, and analyse the data using the global protocols of ForestPlots.net. In detail, we plan to: 1. Conduct a hands-on field course to prepare teams to conduct forest monitoring. This will be based in a rural community where PPBio has already invested in plots. The course will teach skills for plant collection, identification and measurement. Young rural community participants will work with ecologists from Brazil and UK. This provides an opportunity to experiment with forest monitoring - sharing protocols, identifying capacities and leaders, and training in technical data collection skills. Key participants will also be involved in the main fieldwork phase (activity 2), and in the data management and analysis workshop (activity 3), with the project helping provide marginalised rural people with new skills. 2. Remeasure 30 plots along the BR-319 road from Manaus to Porto Velho. BR-319 cuts an 850km transect through the least known forests in Amazonia, a true 'black hole' for biogeochemical and biodiversity science. PPBio has established a series of 111 plots along this road. This project will undertake the first recensuses of plots along this transect, providing the first information on forest dynamics and carbon fluxes from the heart of Brazil's Amazon. 3. Joint workshop to train participants in data management and analysis. We will use ForestPlots.net to help partners manage and analyse information from their plots. The workshop will include scientists, students, and rural people from Amazonian Brazil, lasting 8 days plus one rest day. Biodiversity and forest dynamics data will be integrated into ForestPlots.net, to ensure that PPBio data are carefully checked and comparable internationally. Analysis will involve training in the calculations of carbon stock, carbon balance, vegetation dynamics, biodiversity, and interpreting the rich information on useful Amazon forest species within ForestPlots.net, using an R-package which RAINFOR has developed with NERC support. In turn, participants will feedback and educate the RAINFOR/ForestPlots.net team to determine specific user requirements to make information in the future more accessible, interpretable, and useful for forest researchers, forest dwellers, and forest users.

In 2010 the Amazon Basin experienced unusually dry conditions, a second major drought in 5 years, a pattern which is remarkably similar to some predictions of the future climate of the region. This is because most climate models predict an increase in dry season intensity, and all an increase in temperature in the coming century as a consequence of global climate change. Whether or not long-term climate change is already involved the current event can help us evaluate how humid forest, deciduous forests and savanna ecosystems and species respond to drying, so helping assess the potential scale of impacts as the Amazon climate dries. Our team has a large network of on-the-ground sample plots in the region, and because these are standardised they represent an excellent opportunity to measure the actual impacts of drought. We already did this with the severe 2005 drought (described then as 'the drought of the century' but surpassed in extent this year). In this proposal we focus on our sites at the southern fringes of Amazonia, an area very strongly affected by the 2010 drought. This large area is a 'zone of tension' between Amazon moist forest species, deciduous species, and savanna, with the various vegetation types sometimes adjacent in the same sites. Here we have 30 permanent plots available so we are able for the first time to measure the on-the-ground impacts on different species and vegetation formations at this forest/savanna mixing zone. This is important because it is expected that within these zones of ecological tension that long-term vegetation changes will first be observed, and these areas of high diversity and high carbon storage could significantly affect regional carbon emissions. We plan to do the following: 1) Recensus 30 southern Amazon plots to record tree growth and vegetation productivity. 2) Remeasure nearly 500 trees where we have pre-drought measures of details of their structure, to assess if drought has changed them. 3) Install high-precision measurement tools ("dendrometers") on trees of key species, to enable better monitoring of future droughts 4) Analyse data collected from (1) & (2) to test our hypotheses: 1. The 2010 drought caused biomass carbon loss from forest but not savanna. We expect savanna to prove more resilient than forest, and for forest responses to mirror those of 2005. 2. The 2010 drought accelerated tree death and reduced growth in the forest but not the savanna. We expect forest species to be more sensitive than savanna species when faced with the same degree of drying. 3. Forest & savanna plots that had the greatest biomass loss and/or mortality are those with shallowest soils. We expect soil depth to affect the drought response, with shallower soils having fewer moisture reserves. 4. Within each stand, species which also occur in drier areas were more drought-resistant than those already at the dry end of their range. We expect that the risk a tree faces from drought is related to its geographic distribution, so that species that are typically found in moister climates will be more drought-sensitive than their neighbours. 5. Species differences in drought sensitivity are related to variation in structural traits. We expect the more drought-resistant evergreen trees will have a more conservative hydraulic structure, such as denser wood. The expected outcomes of this research are: 1) Improved quantification of the sensitivity of transitional Amazon forest to drought. 2) A first assessment of the differential sensitivity of forest and savanna trees to drought conditions. 3) By integrating (1) & (2), understand better the chances of savanna replacing forest in the "zone of tension", and even into core Amazon forests, as the climate dries. 4) Improved understanding of the physiological basis of drought-resistance and the importance of soil conditions. 5) The infrastructure installed to allow local collaborators to evaluate effects during future droughts.

The basic shape and branching structure of a tree can be distinctive and characteristic, yet there exists no consistent dataset quantifying how tree form varies across species and how it is related to other functional traits of a tree. Understanding the variation in structure and form of trees is important in order to link tree physiology to tree performance, scale fluxes of water and carbon within and among trees, and understand constraints on tree growth and mortality. These topics hold great importance in the field of ecosystem science, especially in light of current and future changes to climate. It is surprising, therefore, that tree structure and form are currently neglected areas of study. There are two primary reasons for this neglect: 1) it is difficult and time-consuming to quantify tree structure in-situ and 2) there is a lack of theory that explicitly links tree form parameters with physiological function. Recent developments in technology and theory now enable us to overcome these limitations. In this proposal we aim to use new ground-based 3D terrestrial laser scanning technologies (TLS) in combination with recently developed theoretical frameworks to measure and compare tree architecture. We focus on the tropics, since (i) they host the vast majority of broadleaf tree diversity and play a disproportionate role in global and regional carbon and water fluxes, and (ii) the high species diversity of tropical forests (typically 100-250 tree species per hectare) means we can sample a large number of species under almost identical climate and soil conditions, making it more likely to detect overall tendencies in tree form response to environment that are not dominated by the peculiarity of a particular species. Specifically, we will employ TLS to collect highly-detailed 3D structural information from mature rainforest trees spanning contrasting environments ranging from cloud forests to wet rainforests to dry savanna, and contrasting biogeographical histories from the cloud forests of the Andes through legume-dominated forests of Amazonia and Africa, through the dipterocarp-dominated tall forests of Borneo, to the ancient rainforest flora of Australia. All field sites are locations where we have already collected information of the leaf and wood traits of a number of tropical trees. We plan to achieve three goals: i) definition of quantitative classes of tree form using advanced imaging and computational techniques, ii) development of an understanding of the degree of covariance between tree form and tree leaf and wood functional traits, and the degree of phylogenetic constraint and plasticity in tree form, iii) testing and refinement of metabolic-scaling based approaches to scaling fluxes and productivity of tropical tree communities. Over the course of three years our team will: 1) Create a database of branch- and canopy-level trait data collected from our field campaigns. 2) Use variation in branching architecture and canopy structure traits to define a suite of branching and canopy traits that allow for the classification of tree form. 3) Assess the scaling of tree form traits within trees and integrate the scaling of tree-form into a mechanistic plant scaling framework. 4) Explore the link between tree-form traits and leaf and wood traits to determine a whole-tree integrated economics spectrum. In doing so, we hope to acquire a mechanistic understanding of the relationship between tree form, function, phylogeny and environment over a large spatial scale. We expect to find that behind the dazzling variety of shapes and forms found in trees hides a remarkably similar architecture based on fundamental, shared principles.

Latin American forests cover a very large latitudinal and climate gradient extending from the tropics to Southern hemisphere high latitudes. The continent therefore hosts a large variety of forest types including the Amazon - the world's largest tropical forest - as well as the diverse Atlantic forests concentrated along the coast, temperate forests in Chile and Argentina as well as the cold rainforests of Valdivia and the Nothofagus forests of Patagonia. These forests are global epicentres of biological diversity and include several tropical and extra-tropical biodiversity hotspots. For example, the Amazon rainforest is home to ~10% of terrestrial plant and animal species and store a large fraction of global organic carbon. hotspots. Some of these Latin American forests still cover a large fraction of their original (pre-colombian) extent: the Amazon still covers approximately 5 Million km2, which is 80% of its original area. However, others, such as the Atlantic forest, have nearly disappeared and are now heavily fragmented. Temperate forests have also shrunk, despite efforts to halt further reduction. However, economic development, population rises and the growth in global drivers of environmental change mean that all forests now face strong anthropogenic pressures. Locally stressors generally result from ongoing development, selective logging, the hunting of larger birds and mammals, over-exploitation of key forest resources such as valuable palm fruits, mining, and/or forest conversion for agricultural use. Global environmental drivers stem from the world's warming climate. Yet it is not clear how these local pressures and changing environmental conditions will alter the composition of Latin American forests, and whether there are thresholds between human impacts - such as the lack of dispersers in heavily fragmented forest landscapes or climate conditions exceeding limits of species tolerance - and the community level responses of forest plants. We aim to investigate this, supporting the development of strategies that can preserve the diversity of these forests and their functioning. We achieve this by investigating the relationships between diversity and functioning of these forests; exploring whether there are thresholds in functioning resulting both from pressures of forest use and changing climate; by experimentally testing responses; and by generalizing predictive capability to large scales. ARBOLES aims to achieve these goals by integrating established forest inventory approaches with cutting-edge functional trait, genomics, experimental and remote sensing approaches. Our approach involves combining forest plots with plant traits, which will enable us to characterize state and shifts over time in the face of local human disturbance and changing climate and atmospheric composition. We will focus on traits along the following axes: (i) life-history strategies measuring investment in structure (like wood density, leaf mass per area, maximum height), (ii) investment in productive organs (like leaf nutrients), (iii) investment in reproductive organs, (iv) tolerance to water stress and heat stress. The work is being conducted in collaboration with research groups in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru - and will provide a first cross-continent assessment of how humans are influencing Latin American forests.