Global change is impacting forests worldwide, threatening biodiversity and ecosystem services including climate regulation. Understanding how forests respond is critical to forest conservation and climate protection. This review describes an international network of 59 long-term forest dynamics research sites (CTFS-ForestGEO) useful for characterizing forest responses to global change. Within very large plots (median size 25 ha), all stems ≥1 cm diameter are identified to species, mapped, and regularly recensused according to standardized protocols. CTFS-ForestGEO spans 25°S-61°N latitude, is generally representative of the range of bioclimatic, edaphic, and topographic conditions experienced by forests worldwide, and is the only forest monitoring network that applies a standardized protocol to each of the world's major forest biomes. Supplementary standardized measurements at subsets of the sites provide additional information on plants, animals, and ecosystem and environmental variables. CTFS-ForestGEO sites are experiencing multifaceted anthropogenic global change pressures including warming (average 0.61°C), changes in precipitation (up to AE30% change), atmospheric deposition of nitrogen and sulfur compounds (up to 3.8 g N m À2 yr À1 and 3.1 g S m À2 yr À1), and forest fragmentation in the surrounding landscape (up to 88% reduced tree cover within 5 km). The broad suite of measurements made at CTFS-ForestGEO sites makes it possible to investigate the complex ways in which global change is impacting forest dynamics. Ongoing research across the CTFSForestGEO network is yielding insights into how and why the forests are changing, and continued monitoring will provide vital contributions to understanding worldwide forest diversity and dynamics in an era of global change.

Hunting affects a considerably greater area of the tropical forest biome than deforestation and logging combined. Often even large remote protected areas are depleted of a substantial proportion of their vertebrate fauna. However, understanding of the long-term ecological consequences of defaunation in tropical forests remains poor. Using tree census data from a large-scale plot monitored over a 15-year period since the approximate onset of intense hunting, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the immediate consequences of defaunation for a tropical tree community. Our data strongly suggest that over-hunting has engendered pervasive changes in tree population spatial structure and dynamics, leading to a consistent decline in local tree diversity over time. However, we do not find any support for suggestions that over-hunting reduces above-ground biomass or biomass accumulation rate in this forest. To maintain critical ecosystem processes in tropical forests increased efforts are required to protect and restore wildlife populations.

[1] Micrometeorological measurements of evapotranspiration (ET) can be difficult to interpret and use for validating model calculations in the presence of land cover heterogeneity. Land surface fluxes, soil moisture (q), and surface temperatures (T s ) data were collected by an eddy correlation-based tower located at the Orroli (Sardinia) experimental field (covered by woody vegetation, grass, and bare soil) from April 2003 to July 2004. Two Quickbird high-resolution images (summer 2003 and spring 2004) were acquired for depicting the contrasting land cover components. A procedure is presented for estimating ET in heterogeneous ecosystems as the residual term of the energy balance using T s observations, a two-dimensional footprint model, and the Quickbird images. Two variations on the procedure are successfully implemented: a proposed two-source random model (2SR), which treats the heat sources of each land cover component separately but computes the bulk heat transfer coefficient as spatially homogeneous, and a common two-source tile model. For 2SR, new relationships between the interfacial transfer coefficient and the roughness Reynolds number are estimated for the two bare soil-woody vegetation and grass-woody vegetation composite surfaces. The ET versus q relationships for each land cover component were also estimated, showing that that the woody vegetation has a strong tolerance to long droughts, transpiring at rates close to potential for even the driest conditions. Instead, the grass is much less tolerant to q deficits, and the switch from grass to bare soil following the rainy season had a significant impact on ET.

The mechanisms governing tree drought mortality and recovery remain a subject of inquiry and active debate given their role in the terrestrial carbon cycle and their concomitant impact on climate change. Counter-intuitively, many trees do not die during the drought itself. Indeed, observations globally have documented that trees often grow for several years after drought before mortality. A combination of meta-analysis and tree physiological models demonstrate that optimal carbon allocation after drought explains observed patterns of delayed tree mortality and provides a predictive recovery framework. Specifically, post-drought, trees attempt to repair water transport tissue and achieve positive carbon balance through regrowing drought-damaged xylem. Furthermore, the number of years of xylem regrowth required to recover function increases with tree size, explaining why drought mortality increases with size. These results indicate that tree resilience to drought-kill may increase in the future, provided that CO fertilisation facilitates more rapid xylem regrowth.