The Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) – Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) is a global network of forest research plots and scientists dedicated to the study of tropical and temperate forest function and diversity. The multi-institutional network comprises close to 60 research plots across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, with a strong focus on tropical regions. It is strategically poised for monitoring, understanding, and predicting forest responses to global change. 

In a recent review published in Global Change Biology, scientists from the network of 59 long-term forest dynamics research sites (CTFS-ForestGEO) described how useful the plots are for characterizing forest responses to global change. Prof. CAO Min of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) is a co-author of the review.

   The CTFS-ForestGEO forest dynamics sites are representative of the world's more intact forests, covering a diversity of geographical, climatic, edaphic, topographic, and biotic environments. Yet, even this selection of the world's more intact forests is being impacted by multifaceted global change drivers. Because many interacting species and processes are simultaneously being affected by a variety of global change pressures, extracting a mechanistic understanding of observed forest changes is challenging, requiring a holistic understanding of the abiotic setting, site history, demography for all tree life stages, trophic interactions, and ecosystem-level processes. The broad suite of measurements made at CTFS-ForestGEO sites makes it possible to understand the complex ways in which global change is impacting forest dynamics.

Ongoing research across the CTFS-ForestGEO network is yielding insights into how and why the forests are changing. As global change pressures inevitably intensify, ongoing monitoring across the network should prove valuable for documenting and understanding multifaceted forest responses and feedbacks to the climate system.

To project into the future, broad suite of variables measured at CTFS-ForestGEO sites will be invaluable for parameterizing and evaluating ecosystem and earth system models, particularly those that characterize forest demography and differences among species or functional groups.

Together, CTFS-ForestGEO's unique standardized core census and supplementary measurements, applied across all of the world's major forest biomes, will provide mechanistic insight as forests change in the 21st century.

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12712/full