Fertile soil grows tropical trees faster but kills them sooner
Wong MY, Batterman SA, Lucas JM, Fleischer K, Ashton MS
Soil Health
The next time you hear tropical rainforests praised as carbon vaults, know that the most nutrient-rich patches often store less standing carbon per acre than poorer soils, because their trees grow fast and die young.
You'd think that giving trees better soil would just make forests bigger and store more carbon, but tropical forests don't work that way. On rich soils, trees grow faster, yet they also die at higher rates, so the extra growth doesn't pile up into extra biomass. Scientists are still working out exactly why fertile soil seems to speed up both a tree's growth and its death.
Key Findings
Tropical forests store nearly 60% of global vegetation biomass and span huge gradients in soil fertility, from ancient weathered soils to young nutrient-rich ones
Aboveground productivity rises with soil fertility, but aboveground biomass does not increase proportionally because mortality also rises with fertility
The paper proposes a mechanistic framework linking soil fertility to productivity (via photosynthesis, carbon allocation, carbon-use efficiency) and to mortality, plus a research roadmap for predicting global change responses
chevron_right Technical Summary
Rich soil doesn't necessarily mean bigger, more carbon-dense tropical forests, because trees on fertile ground grow faster but also die sooner, roughly canceling out the biomass gain. Understanding this tradeoff is key to predicting how tropical forests will handle climate change.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Soil fertility controls on tropical forest productivity and mortality: synthesis and roadmap.
Tropical forests are highly diverse and productive ecosystems and store nearly 60% of vegetation biomass. Across the tropics, forests span large gradients of soil fertility, from vast regions situa...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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