Research project
THERMOS:Thermal Safety Margins of Earth's Tropical Forests
- Start date: 1 February 2024
- End date: 30 June 2027
- Funder: NERC
- Value: £1,011,500
- Partners and collaborators: Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso (Brazil); IISER Pune (India); Forest Research Institute of Ghana (Ghana); Univesity of Ghent (Belgium); Keral Forest Institute (India); James Cook University (Australia); Sabah Forestry Department (Malaysia); University of Plymouth
- Primary investigator: Prof David Galbraith
- Co-investigators: Professor Emanuel Gloor, Professor Oliver Phillips FRS
- External co-investigators: Dr. Sophie Fauset
- Postdoctoral researcher: Dr. Emma Docherty, Dr. Calil Torres, Dr. Melina Arantes
Earth's tropical forests provide an array of ecosystem services, housing over 50% of global biodiversity, taking up 8-13% of annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions, recycling rainfall at continental scales and directly providing livelihoods to millions of people.
The biological and ecological processes that sustain these services (e.g. photosynthesis and transpiration) are strongly temperature-sensitive, such that the future large-scale functioning of tropical forests depends on keeping their climate space within safe operating limits.
Currently we do not know what the safe operating temperature limits for tropical forests are nor how close they are to upper limits of temperature function. This is due to large data gaps in: 1) the thermal limits of different plant processes – e.g. the temperatures at which the photosynthetic apparatus breaks down, 2) the maximum leaf temperatures that tropical trees experience in the field and 3) how exceedance of leaf-level thermotolerance affects whole plant function.
THERMOS aims to deliver unprecedented large-scale insights into the thermal risk of tropical forests. To do this, a diverse set of complementary methodologies will be used including: 1) extensive field data collection in tropical forests in four continents to determine the high temperature thresholds of key plant processes, 2) drone-based thermal imaging to determine maximum leaf temperatures reached in different sites, 3) new extreme heating greenhouse experiments to test the ability of leaf thermal traits to predict mortality and to evaluate the importance of direct vs. indirect VPD effects in driving mortality, 4) remote sensing to determine how thermally 'safe' forests are across the Tropics and 5) analysis of forest dynamics records to evaluate the role of increasing temperature and VPD in driving increased mortality across tropical forests.
Impact
THERMOS seeks to provide novel understanding of the thermal risk faced by tropical forests globally.