Tropical moist forests are the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystem on Earth, account for 40% of the carbon stored in land ecosystems, and play a major role on the planet’s water and energy cycles. Historically, tropical forests have been important carbon sinks, however extreme climate events, deforestation, and forest degradation through logging, fires, and fragmentation are turning some of the tropical moist forests into carbon sources. It is therefore critical that we quantify how vulnerable or resilient tropical forest landscapes are to climate and land-use change and understand the feedbacks from forest change on the global carbon cycle and climate. This line has become a priority for many research projects within the scientific community, including the PAN tropical investigation of bioGeochemistry and Ecological Adaptation (PANGEA) scoping for a decadal field campaign submitted to NASA, which was developed in collaboration with over 800 researchers from 42 countries.

Previous work indicated that the effect of climate change, deforestation and forest degradation is not uniform within major tropical moist forest ecosystems or across different continents. Understanding the mechanisms that drive the vulnerability of tropical forests to global change requires integrative approaches that combine field measurements, remote sensing, process-based models, data synthesis methods and Indigenous, Traditional, and Local ecological knowledge. Integrative approaches allow scaling data and knowledge from individual trees to landscapes and continents, comprehensively characterizing tropical forests and the patterns of risk to critical transitions. The thorough assessment of vulnerability and resilience across scales is crucial for tailoring actions to mitigate these outcomes and conserve the globally important tropical forest biomes.

This session will convene researchers that combine multiple approaches and techniques to integrate measurements across scales, to better assess the resilience and vulnerability of tropical forests to climate extremes, deforestation, and forest degradation. The diversity of approaches and techniques will stimulate a discussion between researchers with different expertises across disciplines and across techniques, and discuss directions on how to develop and foster positive international collaboration between researchers, and indigenous, local and traditional communities.