Pantropical tree rings show small effects of drought on stem growth.

Increasing drought pressure under anthropogenic climate change may jeopardize the potential of tropical forests to capture carbon in woody biomass and act as a long-term carbon dioxide sink. To evaluate this risk, we assessed drought impacts in 483 tree-ring chronologies from across the tropics and found an overall modest stem growth decline (2.5% with a 95% confidence interval of 2.2 to 2.7%) during the 10% driest years since 1930. Stem growth declines exceeded 10% in 25% of cases and were larger at hotter and drier sites and for gymnosperms compared with angiosperms. Growth declines generally did not outlast drought years and were partially mitigated by growth stimulation in wet years. Thus, pantropical forest carbon sequestration through stem growth has hitherto shown drought resilience that may, however, diminish under future climate change.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Science

• Publication date

  2025-07-31

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/science.adq6607PMID 40743338
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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