Abstract
Tropical forests play a critical role in the global carbon (C) cycle. These ecosystems maintain the highest rates of net primary production (NPP) on Earth (Hengl et al., 2017), contain c. 30% of terrestrial C stocks (Jobbagy & Jackson, 2000), and have some of the largest stores of fine-root biomass globally (Jackson et al., 1996), as well as higher fine-root production and turnover rates compared with other biomes (Cusack et al., 2021). Tropical forest responses to projected warming, altered rainfall regimes, and elevated CO2 concentrations (IPCC, 2021) are likely to be different from other ecosystems because of their unique characteristics (Box 1), making targeted research and model development important for understanding tropical forest–climate feedbacks. There is now a critical mass of long-term global change field experiments and modeling efforts in tropical forests, yet thus far there has been little synthesis, cross-site comparison, or multi-site standardized experimentation among tropical forests to help us understand how these biomes are changing. An organized INSPIRE session at the 108th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America set out to tackle just this. Speakers covered large-scale tropical forest field experiments and modeling efforts, with an emphasis on changes in ecosystem biogeochemistry under warming, drying, elevated atmospheric CO2, and changing nutrient status. In this Meeting report, we provide an overview of the large-scale global change experiments presented and highlight the main objectives and opportunities for tropical forest research that emerged, including cross-site comparisons and integration with ecosystem-scale models (Fig. 1).
