ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Resistance of African tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 98 citations in OpenAlex.
- A meta-analysis of carbon losses and gains from tropical moist forest degradation and regeneration.Science advances · 2026Pooled it
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- Congo Basin Carbon Cycle Responses to Global Change.Global change biology · 2026Review
- Carbon dioxide removals by tropical moist forests offset most land-use emissions across 18 Afrotropical countries.Communications earth & environment · 2026Article
- Knowledge translation platforms: Broker, intermediary or more? A scoping review of definitions, functions and characteristics.Health research policy and systems · 2025Article
- Droughts preceding tree mortality events have increased in duration and intensity, especially in dry biomes.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Storms Are an Important Driver of Change in Tropical Forests.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Environmental drivers of spatial variation in tropical forest canopy height: Insights from NASA's GEDI spaceborne LiDAR.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- High Inter-Specific Diversity and Seasonality of Trunk Radial Growth in Trees Along an Afrotropical Elevational Gradient.Plant, cell & environment · 2025Article
- Evidence of thermophilization in Afromontane forests.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Contrasting carbon cycle along tropical forest aridity gradients in West Africa and Amazonia.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Different Physiological Responses to Continuous Drought between Seedlings and Younger Individuals ofPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Article
- Editorial: Plant diversity and biomass dynamics under environmental variation.Frontiers in plant science · 2023Article
- Article
- Functional susceptibility of tropical forests to climate change.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Regional and local determinants of drought resilience in tropical forests.Ecology and evolution · 2022Review
- Unlocking Drought-Induced Tree Mortality: Physiological Mechanisms to Modeling.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Review
- Article
- Resistance of African tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
61 authors at 20 institutions in 14 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The responses of tropical forests to environmental change are critical uncertainties in predicting the future impacts of climate change. The positive phase of the 2015-2016 El Niño Southern Oscillation resulted in unprecedented heat and low precipitation in the tropics with substantial impacts on the global carbon cycle. The role of African tropical forests is uncertain as their responses to short-term drought and temperature anomalies have yet to be determined using on-the-ground measurements. African tropical forests may be particularly sensitive because they exist in relatively dry conditions compared with Amazonian or Asian forests, or they may be more resistant because of an abundance of drought-adapted species. Here, we report responses of structurally intact old-growth lowland tropical forests inventoried within the African Tropical Rainforest Observatory Network (AfriTRON). We use 100 long-term inventory plots from six countries each measured at least twice prior to and once following the 2015-2016 El Niño event. These plots experienced the highest temperatures and driest conditions on record. The record temperature did not significantly reduce carbon gains from tree growth or significantly increase carbon losses from tree mortality, but the record drought did significantly decrease net carbon uptake. Overall, the long-term biomass increase of these forests was reduced due to the El Niño event, but these plots remained a live biomass carbon sink (0.51 ± 0.40 Mg C ha
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