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Forest inventory plots are widely used to estimate biomass carbon storage and its change over time. While there has been much debate and exploration of the analytical methods for calculating biomass, the methods used to determine rates of wood production have not been evaluated to the same degree. This affects assessment of ecosystem fluxes and may have wider implications if inventory data are used to parameterise biospheric models, or scaled to large areas in assessments of carbon sequestration. Here we use a dataset of 35 long-term Amazonian forest inventory plots to test different methods of calculating wood production rates. These address potential biases associated with three issues that routinely impact the interpretation of tree measurement data: (1) changes in the point of measurement (POM) of stem diameter as trees grow over time; (2) unequal length of time between censuses; and (3) the treatment of trees that pass the minimum diameter threshold ("recruits"). We derive corrections that control for changing POM height, that account for the unobserved growth of trees that die within census intervals, and that explore different assumptions regarding the growth of recruits during the previous census interval. For our dataset we find that annual aboveground coarse wood production (AGWP; in Mg ha−1 year−1 of dry matter) is underestimated on average by 9.2% if corrections are not made to control for changes in POM height. Failure to control for the length of sampling intervals results in a mean underestimation of 2.7% in annual AGWP in our plots for a mean interval length of 3.6 years. Different methods for treating recruits result in mean differences of up to 8.1% in AGWP. In general, the greater the length of time a plot is sampled for and the greater the time elapsed between censuses, the greater the tendency to underestimate wood production. We recommend that POM changes, census interval length, and the contribution of recruits should all be accounted for when estimating productivity rates, and suggest methods for doing this. ; European Union ; UK Natural Environment Research Council ; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ; CASE sponsorship from UNEP-WCMC ; Royal Society University Research Fellowship ; ERC Advanced Grant "Tropical Forests in the Changing Earth System" ; Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award

This is the final version of the article. Available from Wiley via the DOI in this record. ; Quantifying the relationship between tree diameter and height is a key component of efforts to estimate biomass and carbon stocks in tropical forests. Although substantial site-to-site variation in height-diameter allometries has been documented, the time consuming nature of measuring all tree heights in an inventory plot means that most studies do not include height, or else use generic pan-tropical or regional allometric equations to estimate height. Using a pan-tropical dataset of 73 plots where at least 150 trees had in-field ground-based height measurements, we examined how the number of trees sampled affects the performance of locally derived height-diameter allometries, and evaluated the performance of different methods for sampling trees for height measurement. Using cross-validation, we found that allometries constructed with just 20 locally measured values could often predict tree height with lower error than regional or climate-based allometries (mean reduction in prediction error = 0.46 m). The predictive performance of locally derived allometries improved with sample size, but with diminishing returns in performance gains when more than 40 trees were sampled. Estimates of stand-level biomass produced using local allometries to estimate tree height show no over- or under-estimation bias when compared with biomass estimates using field measured heights. We evaluated five strategies to sample trees for height measurement, and found that sampling strategies that included measuring the heights of the ten largest diameter trees in a plot outperformed (in terms of resulting in local height-diameter models with low height prediction error) entirely random or diameter size-class stratified approaches. Our results indicate that even limited sampling of heights can be used to refine height-diameter allometries. We recommend aiming for a conservative threshold of sampling 50 trees per location for height measurement, and including the ten trees with the largest diameter in this sample. ; This paper is a product of the RAINFOR, AfriTRON and T-FORCES networks, for which we are indebted to the hundreds of institutions, field assistants and local communities across many countries that have supported and hosted fieldwork. The three networks have been supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Urgency Grants and NERC Consortium Grants "AMAZONICA" (NE/F005806/1), "TROBIT" (NE/D005590/1) and "BIO-RED" (NE/N012542/1), a NERC New Investigators Grant, a European Research Council grant ("Tropical Forests in the Changing Earth System"), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (283080, "GEOCARBON"; 282664, "AMAZALERT"), the Royal Society and Gabon's National Parks Agency (ANPN). R.J.W.B. is funded by a NERC research fellowship (grant ref: NE/I021160/1). S.L.L. was supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, ERC Advanced Grant and a Phillip Leverhulme Prize. O.L.P. is supported by an ERC Advanced Grant and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. L.F.B. was supported by a NERC studentship, RGS-IBG Henrietta Hutton Grant and Royal Society Dudley Stamp Award. R.H. and M.C. were supported through the long-term research development project no. RVO 67985939 and a KBFSC research fellowship (2011, to R.H.). M. Svátek was funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (grant number INGO II LG15051). We thank Georgia Pickavance for assistance with database curation, and Natacha Nssi Bengone, Sylvester Chenikan, Eric Chezeaux, Armandu Daniels, Jean-Louis Doucet, Kath Jeffery, Edi Mirmanto, Abel Monteagudo-Mendoza, Faustin Mpanya Lukasu, Reuben Nilus, Guido Pardo, Lourens Poorter, Sylvester Tan, Marisol Toledo, Armando Torres-Lezama, John Tshibamba Mukendi, Richard Tshombe, Geertje van der Heijden, Lee White, Hannsjoerg Woell and John Woods, Gabon's National Parks Agency (ANPN), the Forest Development Authority of Liberia and Wildlife Conservation Society-Democratic Republic of Congo for assistance with access to datasets. We thank an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on this manuscript.

Background: Several independent lines of evidence suggest that Amazon forests have provided a significant carbon sink service, and also that the Amazon carbon sink in intact, mature forests may now be threatened as a result of different processes. There has however been no work done to quantify non-land-use-change forest carbon fluxes on a national basis within Amazonia, or to place these national fluxes and their possible changes in the context of the major anthropogenic carbon fluxes in the region. Here we present a first attempt to interpret results from ground-based monitoring of mature forest carbon fluxes in a biogeographically, politically, and temporally differentiated way. Specifically, using results from a large long-term network of forest plots, we estimate the Amazon biomass carbon balance over the last three decades for the different regions and nine nations of Amazonia, and evaluate the magnitude and trajectory of these differentiated balances in relation to major national anthropogenic carbon emissions. Results: The sink of carbon into mature forests has been remarkably geographically ubiquitous across Amazonia, being substantial and persistent in each of the five biogeographic regions within Amazonia. Between 1980 and 2010, it has more than mitigated the fossil fuel emissions of every single national economy, except that of Venezuela. For most nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname) the sink has probably additionally mitigated all anthropogenic carbon emissions due to Amazon deforestation and other land use change. While the sink has weakened in some regions since 2000, our analysis suggests that Amazon nations which are able to conserve large areas of natural and semi-natural landscape still contribute globally-significant carbon sequestration. Conclusions: Mature forests across all of Amazonia have contributed significantly to mitigating climate change for decades. Yet Amazon nations have not directly benefited from providing this global scale ecosystem ...

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Honorio Coronado, E. N., Dexter, K. G., Pennington, R. T., Chave, J., Lewis, S. L., Alexiades, M. N., Alvarez, E., Alves de Oliveira, A., Amaral, I. L., Araujo-Murakami, A., Arets, E. J. M. M., Aymard, G. A., Baraloto, C., Bonal, D., Brienen, R., Cerón, C., Cornejo Valverde, F., Di Fiore, A., Farfan-Rios, W., Feldpausch, T. R., Higuchi, N., Huamantupa-Chuquimaco, I., Laurance, S. G., Laurance, W. F., López-Gonzalez, G., Marimon, B. S., Marimon-Junior, B. H., Monteagudo Mendoza, A., Neill, D., Palacios Cuenca, W., Peñuela Mora, M. C., Pitman, N. C. A., Prieto, A., Quesada, C. A., Ramirez Angulo, H., Rudas, A., Ruschel, A. R., Salinas Revilla, N., Salomão, R. P., Segalin de Andrade, A., Silman, M. R., Spironello, W., ter Steege, H., Terborgh, J., Toledo, M., Valenzuela Gamarra, L., Vieira, I. C. G., Vilanova Torre, E., Vos, V., Phillips, O. L. (2015), Phylogenetic diversity of Amazonian tree communities. Diversity and Distributions, 21: 1295–1307. doi:10.1111/ddi.12357, which has been published in final form at 10.1111/ddi.12357 ; Aim: To examine variation in the phylogenetic diversity (PD) of tree communities across geographical and environmental gradients in Amazonia. Location: Two hundred and eighty-three c. 1 ha forest inventory plots from across Amazonia. Methods: We evaluated PD as the total phylogenetic branch length across species in each plot (PDss), the mean pairwise phylogenetic distance between species (MPD), the mean nearest taxon distance (MNTD) and their equivalents standardized for species richness (ses.PDss, ses.MPD, ses.MNTD). We compared PD of tree communities growing (1) on substrates of varying geological age; and (2) in environments with varying ecophysiological barriers to growth and survival. Results: PDss is strongly positively correlated with species richness (SR), whereas MNTD has a negative correlation. Communities on geologically young- and intermediate-aged substrates (western and central Amazonia respectively) have the highest SR, and therefore the highest PDss and the lowest MNTD. We find that the youngest and oldest substrates (the latter on the Brazilian and Guiana Shields) have the highest ses.PDss and ses.MNTD. MPD and ses.MPD are strongly correlated with how evenly taxa are distributed among the three principal angiosperm clades and are both highest in western Amazonia. Meanwhile, seasonally dry tropical forest (SDTF) and forests on white sands have low PD, as evaluated by any metric. Main conclusions: High ses.PDss and ses.MNTD reflect greater lineage diversity in communities. We suggest that high ses.PDss and ses.MNTD in western Amazonia results from its favourable, easy-to-colonize environment, whereas high values in the Brazilian and Guianan Shields may be due to accumulation of lineages over a longer period of time. White-sand forests and SDTF are dominated by close relatives from fewer lineages, perhaps reflecting ecophysiological barriers that are difficult to surmount evolutionarily. Because MPD and ses.MPD do not reflect lineage diversity per se, we suggest that PDss, ses.PDss and ses.MNTD may be the most useful diversity metrics for setting large-scale conservation priorities. ; FINCyT - PhD studentship ; School of Geography of the University of Leeds ; Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh ; Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) ; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ; European Union's Seventh Framework Programme ; ERC ; CNPq/PELD ; NSF - Fellowship

This is the final version of the article. Available from Wiley via the DOI in this record. ; Understanding the processes that determine above-ground biomass (AGB) in Amazonian forests is important for predicting the sensitivity of these ecosystems to environmental change and for designing and evaluating dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). AGB is determined by inputs from woody productivity [woody net primary productivity (NPP)] and the rate at which carbon is lost through tree mortality. Here, we test whether two direct metrics of tree mortality (the absolute rate of woody biomass loss and the rate of stem mortality) and/or woody NPP, control variation in AGB among 167 plots in intact forest across Amazonia. We then compare these relationships and the observed variation in AGB and woody NPP with the predictions of four DGVMs. The observations show that stem mortality rates, rather than absolute rates of woody biomass loss, are the most important predictor of AGB, which is consistent with the importance of stand size structure for determining spatial variation in AGB. The relationship between stem mortality rates and AGB varies among different regions of Amazonia, indicating that variation in wood density and height/diameter relationships also influences AGB. In contrast to previous findings, we find that woody NPP is not correlated with stem mortality rates and is weakly positively correlated with AGB. Across the four models, basin-wide average AGB is similar to the mean of the observations. However, the models consistently overestimate woody NPP and poorly represent the spatial patterns of both AGB and woody NPP estimated using plot data. In marked contrast to the observations, DGVMs typically show strong positive relationships between woody NPP and AGB. Resolving these differences will require incorporating forest size structure, mechanistic models of stem mortality and variation in functional composition in DGVMs. ; This paper is a product of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme AMAZALERT project (282664). The field data used in this study have been generated by the RAINFOR network, which has been supported by a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant, the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme projects 283080, 'GEOCARBON'; and 282664, 'AMAZALERT'; ERC grant 'Tropical Forests in the Changing Earth System'), and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Urgency, Consortium and Standard Grants 'AMAZONICA' (NE/F005806/1), 'TROBIT' (NE/D005590/1) and 'Niche Evolution of South American Trees' (NE/I028122/1). Additional data were included from the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network – a collaboration between Conservation International, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society, and partly funded by these institutions, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and other donors. Fieldwork was also partially supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico of Brazil (CNPq), project Programa de Pesquisas Ecológicas de Longa Duração (PELD-403725/2012-7). A.R. acknowledges funding from the Helmholtz Alliance 'Remote Sensing and Earth System Dynamics'; L.P., M.P.C. E.A. and M.T. are partially funded by the EU FP7 project 'ROBIN' (283093), with co-funding for E.A. from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (KB-14-003-030); B.C. [was supported in part by the US DOE (BER) NGEE-Tropics project (subcontract to LANL). O.L.P. is supported by an ERC Advanced Grant and is a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award holder. P.M. acknowledges support from ARC grant FT110100457 and NERC grants NE/J011002/1, and T.R.B. acknowledges support from a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

Aim: The accurate mapping of forest carbon stocks is essential for understanding the global carbon cycle, for assessing emissions from deforestation, and for rational land-use planning. Remote sensing (RS) is currently the key tool for this purpose, but RS does not estimate vegetation biomass directly, and thus may miss significant spatial variations in forest structure. We test the stated accuracy of pantropical carbon maps using a large independent field dataset. Location: Tropical forests of the Amazon basin. The permanent archive of the field plot data can be accessed at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5521/FORESTPLOTS.NET/2014_1 Methods: Two recent pantropical RS maps of vegetation carbon are compared to a unique ground-plot dataset, involving tree measurements in 413 large inventory plots located in nine countries. The RS maps were compared directly to field plots, and kriging of the field data was used to allow area-based comparisons. Results: The two RS carbon maps fail to capture the main gradient in Amazon forest carbon detected using 413 ground plots, from the densely wooded tall forests of the north-east, to the light-wooded, shorter forests of the south-west. The differences between plots and RS maps far exceed the uncertainties given in these studies, with whole regions over- or under-estimated by >???25%, whereas regional uncertainties for the maps were reported to be

Understanding the processes that determine aboveground biomass (AGB) in Amazonian forests is important for predicting the sensitivity of these ecosystems to environmental change and for designing and evaluating dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). AGB is determined by inputs from woody productivity (woody NPP) and the rate at which carbon is lost through tree mortality. Here, we test whether two direct metrics of tree mortality (the absolute rate of woody biomass loss and the rate of stem mortality) and/or woody NPP, control variation in AGB among 167 plots in intact forest across Amazonia. We then compare these relationships and the observed variation in AGB and woody NPP with the predictions of four DGVMs. The observations show that stem mortality rates, rather than absolute rates of woody biomass loss, are the most important predictor of AGB, which is consistent with the importance of stand size-structure for determining spatial variation in AGB. The relationship between stem mortality rates and AGB varies among different regions of Amazonia, indicating that variation in wood density and height/diameter relationships also influence AGB. In contrast to previous findings, we find that woody NPP is not correlated with stem mortality rates, and is weakly positively correlated with AGB. Across the four models, basin-wide average AGB is similar to the mean of the observations. However, the models consistently overestimate woody NPP, and poorly represent the spatial patterns of both AGB and woody NPP estimated using plot data. In marked contrast to the observations, DGVMs typically show strong positive relationships between woody NPP and AGB. Resolving these differences will require incorporating forest size structure, mechanistic models of stem mortality and variation in functional composition in DGVMs. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. ; This paper is a product of the European Union's Seventh Frame-work Programme AMAZALERT project (282664). The field dataused in this study have been generated by the RAINFOR net-work, which has been supported by a Gordon and Betty MooreFoundation grant, the European Union's Seventh FrameworkProgramme projects 283080, 'GEOCARBON'; and 282664,'AMAZALERT'; ERC grant 'Tropical Forests in the ChangingEarth System'), and Natural Environment Research Council(NERC) Urgency, Consortium and Standard Grants 'AMAZO-NICA' (NE/F005806/1), 'TROBIT' (NE/D005590/1) and 'NicheEvolution of South American Trees' (NE/I028122/1). Additionaldata were included from the Tropical Ecology Assessment andMonitoring (TEAM) Network – a collaboration between Conser-vation International, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smith-sonian Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society, andpartly funded by these institutions, the Gordon and Betty MooreFoundation, and other donors. Fieldwork was also partially sup-ported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientı´fico eTecnolo´gico of Brazil (CNPq), project Programa de PesquisasEcolo´gicas de Longa Duracßa˜o (PELD-403725/2012-7). A.R.acknowledges funding from the Helmholtz Alliance 'RemoteSensing and Earth System Dynamics'; L.P., M.P.C. E.A. andM.T. are partially funded by the EU FP7 project 'ROBIN'(283093), with co-funding for E.A. from the Dutch Ministry ofEconomic Affairs (KB-14-003-030); B.C. [was supported in partby the US DOE (BER) NGEE-Tropics project (subcontract toLANL). O.L.P. is supported by an ERC Advanced Grant and is aRoyal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award holder. P.M.acknowledges support from ARC grant FT110100457 and NERCgrants NE/J011002/1, and T.R.B. acknowledges support from aLeverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

© 2014 The Authors. Global Ecology and Biogeography published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. ; The accurate mapping of forest carbon stocks is essential for understanding the global carbon cycle, for assessing emissions from deforestation, and for rational land-use planning. Remote sensing (RS) is currently the key tool for this purpose, but RS does not estimate vegetation biomass directly, and thus may miss significant spatial variations in forest structure. We test the stated accuracy of pantropical carbon maps using a large independent field dataset. ; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ; European Union's Seventh Framework Programme ; ERC ; NERC ; PRONEX -FAPEAM/CNPq. ; Hidroveg FAPESP/FAPEAM ; Universal/CNPq. ; INCT-CENBAM ; Investissement d'Avenir grants of the French ANR. ; Royal Society Fellowship ; Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this record ; Most of the planet's diversity is concentrated in the tropics, which includes many regions undergoing rapid climate change. Yet, while climate-induced biodiversity changes are widely documented elsewhere, few studies have addressed this issue for lowland tropical ecosystems. Here we investigate whether the floristic and functional composition of intact lowland Amazonian forests have been changing by evaluating records from 106 long-term inventory plots spanning 30 years. We analyse three traits that have been hypothesized to respond to different environmental drivers (increase in moisture stress and atmospheric CO2 concentrations): maximum tree size, biogeographic water-deficit affiliation and wood density. Tree communities have become increasingly dominated by large-statured taxa, but to date there has been no detectable change in mean wood density or water deficit affiliation at the community level, despite most forest plots having experienced an intensification of the dry season. However, among newly recruited trees, dry-affiliated genera have become more abundant, while the mortality of wet-affiliated genera has increased in those plots where the dry season has intensified most. Thus, a slow shift to a more dry-affiliated Amazonia is underway, with changes in compositional dynamics (recruits and mortality) consistent with climate-change drivers, but yet to significantly impact whole-community composition. The Amazon observational record suggests that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is driving a shift within tree communities to large-statured species and that climate changes to date will impact forest composition, but long generation times of tropical trees mean that biodiversity change is lagging behind climate change. ; Support for RAINFOR has come from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Urgency Grants and NERC Consortium Grants "AMAZONICA" (NE/F005806/1), "TROBIT" (NE/D005590/1) and "BIO‐RED" (NE/N012542/1), a European Research Council (ERC) grant (T‐FORCES, "Tropical Forests in the Changing Earth System"), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (282664, "AMAZALERT") and the Royal Society (CH160091). OLP was supported by an ERC Advanced Grant and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. KGD was supported by a Leverhulme Trust International Academic Fellowship. This paper is part of the PhD of AE‐M, which was funded by the ERC T‐FORCES grant. AE‐M is currently supported by T‐FORCES and the NERC project "TREMOR" (NE/N004655/1).

Tropical forests are global centres of biodiversity and carbon storage. Many tropical countries aspire to protect forest to fulfil biodiversity and climate mitigation policy targets, but the conservation strategies needed to achieve these two functions depend critically on the tropical forest tree diversity-carbon storage relationship. Assessing this relationship is challenging due to the scarcity of inventories where carbon stocks in aboveground biomass and species identifications have been simultaneously and robustly quantified. Here, we compile a unique pan-tropical dataset of 360 plots located in structurally intact old-growth closed-canopy forest, surveyed using standardised methods, allowing a multi-scale evaluation of diversity-carbon relationships in tropical forests. Diversity-carbon relationships among all plots at 1 ha scale across the tropics are absent, and within continents are either weak (Asia) or absent (Amazonia, Africa). A weak positive relationship is detectable within 1 ha plots, indicating that diversity effects in tropical forests may be scale dependent. The absence of clear diversity-carbon relationships at scales relevant to conservation planning means that carbon-centred conservation strategies will inevitably miss many high diversity ecosystems. As tropical forests can have any combination of tree diversity and carbon stocks both require explicit consideration when optimising policies to manage tropical carbon and biodiversity. ; This paper is a product of the RAINFOR, AfriTRON and T-FORCES networks, for which we are hugely indebted to hundreds of institutions, field assistants and local communities across many countries that have hosted fieldwork. The three networks have been supported by a European Research Council (ERC) grant ("T-FORCES" - Tropical Forests in the Changing Earth System), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (283080, 'GEOCARBON'; 282664, 'AMAZALERT'), and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Urgency Grants and NERC Consortium Grants 'AMAZONICA' (NE/F005806/1) and 'TROBIT' (NE/D005590/1), 'BIO-RED' (NE/N012542/1) and a NERC New Investigators Grant, the Royal Society, the Centre for International Forestry (CIFOR) and Gabon's National Parks Agency (ANPN). Additional data were included from the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network, a collaboration between Conservation International, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society, and partly funded by these institutions, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and other donors. J.T. was supported by a NERC PhD Studentship with CASE sponsorship from UNEP-WCMC. R.J.W.B. is funded by a NERC research fellowship (grant ref: NE/I021160/1). S.L.L. was supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, ERC Advanced Grant (T-FORCES) and a Phillip Leverhulme Prize. O.L.P. is supported by an ERC Advanced Grant (T-FORCES) and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. L.F.B. was supported by a NERC studentship and RGS-IBG Henrietta Hutton Grant. We thank the National Council for Science and Technology Development of Brazil (CNPq) for support to Project Cerrado/Amazonia Transition (PELD/403725/2012-7), Project Phytogeography of Amazonia/Cerrado Transition (CNPq/PPBio/457602/2012-0) and Productivity Grant to B.S.M and B.H.M-J. Funding for plots in the Udzungwa Mountains (Tanzania) was obtained from the Leverhulme Trust under the Valuing the Arc project. We thank the ANPN (Gabon), WCS-Congo and WCS-DR Congo, Marien Ngouabi University and the University of Kisangani for logistical support in Africa, and the Tropenbos Kalimantan project (ITCI plots) and WWF (KUB plots) for providing data from Asia. This study is contribution number 706 to the Technical Series (TS) of the BDFFP – (INPA-STRI). For assistance with access to datasets we thank Adriana Prieto, Agustín Rudas, Alejandro Araujo-Murakami, Alexander G. Parada Gutierrez, Anand Roopsind, Atila Alves de Oliveira, Claudinei Oliveira dos Santos, C. E. Timothy Paine, David Neill, Eliana Jimenez-Rojas, Freddy Ramirez Arevalo, Hannsjoerg Woell, Iêda Leão do Amaral, Irina Mendoza Polo, Isau Huamantupa-Chuquimaco, Julien Engel, Kathryn Jeffery, Luzmila Arroyo, Michael D. Swaine, Nallaret Davila Cardozo, Natalino Silva, Nigel C. A. Pitman, Niro Higuchi, Raquel Thomas, Renske van Ek, Richard Condit, Rodolfo Vasquez Martinez, Timothy J. Killeen, Walter A. Palacios, Wendeson Castro. We thank Georgina Mace and Jon Lloyd for comments on the manuscript. We thank our deceased colleagues, Samuel Almeida, Kwaku Duah, Alwyn Gentry, and Sandra Patiño, for their invaluable contributions to this work and our wider understanding of tropical forest ecology.

Open Acess journal ; While Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, the abundance of trees is skewed strongly towards relatively few 'hyperdominant' species. In addition to their diversity, Amazonian trees are a key component of the global carbon cycle, assimilating and storing more carbon than any other ecosystem on Earth. Here we ask, using a unique data set of 530 forest plots, if the functions of storing and producing woody carbon are concentrated in a small number of tree species, whether the most abundant species also dominate carbon cycling, and whether dominant species are characterized by specific functional traits. We find that dominance of forest function is even more concentrated in a few species than is dominance of tree abundance, with only ≈1% of Amazon tree species responsible for 50% of carbon storage and productivity. Although those species that contribute most to biomass and productivity are often abundant, species maximum size is also influential, while the identity and ranking of dominant species varies by function and by region. ; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ; European Union Seventh Framework Programme ; ERC ; Natural Environment Research Council ; PRONEX—FAPEAM/CNPq ; Hidroveg FAPESP/FAPEAM ; Universal/CNPq ; INCT-CENBAM ; Fitogeografia da Transição Amazônia/Cerrado CNPq ; Transição Amazônia/Cerrado ; French ANR - Investissement d'Avenir grants ; CNPq ; Royal Society - Wolfson Research Merit Award ; Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs