Version 1
: Received: 31 August 2023 / Approved: 31 August 2023 / Online: 4 September 2023 (03:46:48 CEST)
How to cite:
Williamson, G.; Tng, D.; Bowman, D. Climate, Fire, and Anthropogenic Disturbance Determine the Current Global Distribution of Tropical Forest. Preprints2023, 2023090127. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0127.v1
Williamson, G.; Tng, D.; Bowman, D. Climate, Fire, and Anthropogenic Disturbance Determine the Current Global Distribution of Tropical Forest. Preprints 2023, 2023090127. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0127.v1
Williamson, G.; Tng, D.; Bowman, D. Climate, Fire, and Anthropogenic Disturbance Determine the Current Global Distribution of Tropical Forest. Preprints2023, 2023090127. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0127.v1
APA Style
Williamson, G., Tng, D., & Bowman, D. (2023). Climate, Fire, and Anthropogenic Disturbance Determine the Current Global Distribution of Tropical Forest. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0127.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Williamson, G., David Tng and David Bowman. 2023 "Climate, Fire, and Anthropogenic Disturbance Determine the Current Global Distribution of Tropical Forest" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202309.0127.v1
Abstract
Tropical forest and savanna biomes are pivotal in the functioning of the Earth system. Tropical forests are one of the largest terrestrial biosphere carbon pools, whereas savannas exchange carbon between the biosphere and atmosphere via frequent and extensive landscape fires. Both are biodiverse and under increasing threat due to land clearing and anthropogenic climate change. Reliable mapping of tropical forest and savanna is essential to provide understanding of how anthropogenic impacts are affecting the extent of these biomes. Using Google Maps satellite imagery, we manually classified 24,239 random points as forest, savanna, or anthropogenic landscapes within the tropics. Because fire and climate are correlated, we developed separate geospatial models to rank the importance of climate, topography, and human influence on vegetation present. This modelling confirmed that those areas with more fires had lower probabilities of tropical forest, that forest was most likely in areas with high mean annual rainfall with little seasonal variation in precipitation, and that anthropogenic factors disrupt this environmental predictability. We found there were environments where tropical forest and savanna were equally probable are geographically restricted. These relationships suggest that future drier climates projected under anthropogenic climate change, combined with clearing and burning that have reduced tropical forest extent to a subset of its theoretical distribution, will lead to irreversible loss of tropical forests. Our modelling provides global mapping that can be used track further changes to distribution of rainforests.
Biology and Life Sciences, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
