African Rainforest Biodiversity – An international study coordinated by IRD and CIRAD researchers shows the composition of Central Africa’s rainforests and their vulnerability to climate change and increased pressure from human activities expected in the coming decades. Thanks to a special data set – calling on more than 6 million trees in five countries – the researchers created the first continuous maps of the flowers and their functioning of these forests, which allowed them to identify the most vulnerable areas. The results have been published
Central Africa is the world’s second largest area of tropical rainforest. This vast lake of biodiversity includes five major countries: Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. It provides many ecosystem services, such as regulating the exchange cycles between the land and the atmosphere, and helps ensure food security for local populations. 21 is expected in Africa due to the threat of climate change and demographic pressure
African Rainforest Biodiversity
The protection and sustainable management of these forests is a serious challenge for policy makers. It requires a better understanding of these ecosystems, particularly their structure and vulnerability to ongoing changes.
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For the study, researchers worked with forestry consultants and logging companies to compile a new dataset of 6 million trees from more than 185,000 locations around the world. They first modeled and mapped the composition and efficacy of flowers. Performance factors considered include tree hardiness, dominant leaf type (deciduous or evergreen), and tree size in diameter. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and United Nations Regional Demography.
“The forest region of Central Africa is far from being a green carpet. It is home to a variety of forests with unique characteristics, including carbon storage capacity.”
“This diversity can be explained by changes in climate (humidity, temperature, transpiration rate, rainfall) and soil, as well as the history of African vegetation and the level of human activity that has destroyed thousands of forests. years, for example, changes in agriculture.”
Researchers have shown that some regions may be more vulnerable to climate change than others. For example,
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“Forests in the north and south of the region, the Atlantic Forest, and most of the forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, home to more than half of Central Africa’s forests, are among the most vulnerable.”
The maps and data used for this study, available online in the Cirad database, provide scientists with useful information about the functioning and potential of forests and their carbon storage potential.
Vulnerability gradient of Ctral African forests to climate change and increased human pressure by 2085. Purple areas are most vulnerable to climate change and human pressure; gre areas are the most vulnerable of the two; blue areas are more vulnerable to climate change and less vulnerable to human pressure, while the opposite is true for orange areas.
“The diversity of forest types in Central Africa provides different responses to global change. Therefore, it is important to consider it as part of a sustainable policy to manage and combat climate change.”
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“These results must now be used and applied to develop land use plans that maintain connectivity between protected areas through sustainably managed timber-producing forests while maintaining forest characteristics. In areas of greatest human pressure, managers can restore this connection through biodiversity restoration programs or agroforestry development.”
, concluded Sylvie Gourlet-Fleury, CIRAD forest ecologist and one of the main coordinators of the study.
Reference: M. Réjou-Mechain, F. Mortier, J-F. Bastin, G. Cornu, N. Barbier, N. Baiot, F. Benedet, X. Bray, G. Daubi, V. Deblauet, J-L. Doucet, C. Doumge, A. Fayolle, C. Garcia, J-P. Wait, J-J. Lumeto, A. Ngomanda, P. Ploton, B. Sonke, K. Trottier, R. Wimal, O. Yongo, R. Pelissier, S. Gourlet-Fleury. Exploring the structure of African rainforests and their vulnerability to global change, Martin Sullivan has been funded by the European Research Council, the Royal Society and the Natural Environment Research Council.
Oliver Phillips is supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, the Natural Environment Research Council, the Royal Society and is the recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
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Simon Lewis has received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, the Royal Society, the European Union, the Leverhulme Trust, the International Center for Forestry, the Gabon National Parks Agency, Microsoft Research, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and David and Lucille Packard. base.
About 2 million km² of Africa is covered by tropical forests. They are second only to Amazonia, which covers an area of about 6 million km². Rain forests are home to many species. For example, there are at least 40,000 tree species in the world’s tropical forests, and up to 6,000 in African forests.
However, the tropical forests of Africa are less studied than those of Amazonia and Southeast Asia. And the continent’s tropical forests are being lost at the rate of 0.3% annually due to deforestation. This is slower than Amazonia (about 0.5% per year in Brazil) and Southeast Asia (1% in Indonesia).
But if palm oil production increases due to growing global demand, there could be significant costs in the future. Another major threat is deforestation, which is also increasing.
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The world’s tropical forests contain 250 billion tons of carbon. If global temperature rise is to be kept below 2°C, this carbon must be stored in trees rather than released into the atmosphere. In this regard, incentives to conserve forests for carbon were formally recognized at the 2015 Paris climate conference. Examples include the United Nations REDD+ policy framework.
But our study of the relationship between the amount of carbon stock in forests and their biodiversity yielded two interesting results. The first suggests that carbon-focused approaches such as REDD+ miss many high-biodiversity forests. Because forests that store large amounts of carbon are not necessarily home to many species.
Second, African rainforests have their own characteristics. In particular, we found that they save more carbon than the Amazon. This makes the design of defense policies more important and more difficult.
On the face of it, incentives to protect forests for their carbon footprint should also benefit biodiversity. Because they call for more protection of forests. But the protection of one area often means threats from other areas. Therefore, protecting some forests for carbon can increase human pressure on others. Therefore, it is important to understand the relationship between biodiversity and carbon storage in order to assess whether carbon storage also protects forest biodiversity. This is where we started our research.
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Previous studies have found that ecosystem functions such as carbon storage increase with biodiversity. Therefore, forests with more tree species can be expected to have more carbon. However, it is not clear whether this positive effect on biodiversity is evident in tropical forests with high diversity.
To see the relationship between carbon and biodiversity in mature tropical forests, we, a team of 115 scientists from 22 countries, studied 360 objects found in tropical forests of South America, Africa and Asia. In each hectare (100 by 100 m), we saw and measured the diameter of the entire tree. From here we can calculate the amount of carbon stored in the forest.
Interestingly, we found that tree diversity and carbon storage were completely unrelated, even after controlling for climate and soil effects.
The lack of a link between tree diversity and carbon storage means that strategies such as REDD+, which only promote the conservation of carbon-rich forests, may miss some high-diversity forests.
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That’s not to say that maintaining a carbon focus is no longer important. Preserving forests for carbon sequestration will be critical to reducing global warming, and programs such as REDD+ are needed if this occurs.
But our results show that biodiversity needs to be taken into account when planning protected areas, and cannot be assumed to automatically benefit from carbon-intensive conservation.
Our results contribute to the understanding that African rainforests are unique. For example, they save more carbon than the Amazon. On average, one hectare of African rainforest stores 183 tons of carbon, compared to 140 tons for the same area of Amazonian rainforest, but that’s 170 fewer trees per hectare.
In African forests, more carbon comes from larger trees; The average diameter of a tree in the African rainforest is 1.5 times the height of an Amazonian tree. Trees in African rainforests are also taller than their Amazonian counterparts.
The Central Africa Forest Ecosystems Conservation Project
African forests also have fewer tree species than tropical forests on other continents. If you identify 300 trees in an African forest, you’ll find an average of 65 species compared to 109.
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