Publications

Zhang-Zheng H; Adu-Bredu S; Duah-Gyamfi A; Moore S; Addo-Danso SD; Amissah L; Valentini R; Djagbletey G; Anim-Adjei K; Quansah J (2024). Contrasting carbon cycle along tropical forest aridity gradients in West Africa and Amazonia.. Nature communications.

Tropical forests cover large areas of equatorial Africa and play a substantial role in the global carbon cycle. However, there has been a lack of biometric measurements to understand the forests’ gross and net primary productivity (GPP, NPP) and their allocation. Here we present a detailed field assessment of the carbon budget of multiple forest sites in Africa, by monitoring 14 one-hectare plots along an aridity gradient in Ghana, West Africa. When compared with an equivalent aridity gradient in Amazonia, the studied West African forests generally had higher productivity and lower carbon use efficiency (CUE).

Kumeh, Eric Mensah. (2023). How agroecology can help build dynamic cocoa agroforests in Ghana.. Agroforestry at work .

This article describes the transformative potential of agroecology as a beacon of hope for reestablishing balance in Ghana’s cocoa-forest mosaic landscapes. Agroecology — rooted in the principles of ecological harmony and sustainable agriculture — offers a way to revive and restore biodiversity, empower farmers and ensure a resilient and thriving future for cocoa farms.

Boonman, C.C.F., Serra-Diaz, J.M., Hoeks, S., Guo, W-Y., Enquist, B.J., , B., Malhi, Y., Merow, C., Buitenwerf, R., Svenning, J-C. (2024). More than 17,000 tree species are at risk from rapid global change.. Nature Communication.

Trees are pivotal to global biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, yet accelerating global changes threaten global tree diversity, making accurate species extinction risk assessments necessary. To identify species that require expert-based re-evaluation, we assess exposure to change in six anthropogenic threats over the last two decades for 32,090 tree species. We estimated that over half (54.2%) of the assessed species have been exposed to increasing threats. Only 8.7% of these species are considered threatened by the IUCN Red List, whereas they include more than half of the Data Deficient species (57.8%). These findings suggest a substantial underestimation of threats and associated extinction risk for tree species in current assessments. We also map hotspots of tree species exposed to rapidly changing threats around the world. Our data-driven approach can strengthen the efforts going into expert-based IUCN Red List assessments by facilitating prioritization among species for re-evaluation, allowing for more efficient conservation efforts.

Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng, Stephen Adu-Bredu, Akwasi Duah-Gyamfi, Sam Moore, Shalom D. Addo-Danso, Lucy Amissah, Riccardo Valentini, Gloria Djagbletey, Kelvin Anim-Adjei, John Quansah, Bernice Sarpong, Kennedy Owusu-Afriyie, Agne Gvozdevaite, Minxue Tang, Maria C. Ruiz-Jaen, Forzia Ibrahim, Cécile A. J. Girardin, Sami Rifai, Cecilia A. L. Dahlsjö, Terhi Riutta, Xiongjie Deng, Yuheng Sun, Iain Colin Prentice, Imma Oliveras Menor & Yadvinder Malhi (2024). Contrasting carbon cycle along tropical forest aridity gradients in West Africa and Amazonia. Nature Communications.

Here we present a detailed field assessment of the carbon budget of multiple forest sites in Africa, by monitoring 14 one-hectare plots along an aridity gradient in Ghana, West Africa. When compared with an equivalent aridity gradient in Amazonia, the studied West African forests generally had higher productivity and lower carbon use efficiency (CUE). The West African aridity gradient consistently shows the highest NPP, CUE, GPP, and autotrophic respiration at a medium-aridity site, Bobiri. Notably, NPP and GPP of the site are the highest yet reported anywhere for intact forests. Widely used data products substantially underestimate productivity when compared to biometric measurements in Amazonia and Africa. Our analysis suggests that the high productivity of the African forests is linked to their large GPP allocation to canopy and semi-deciduous characteristics.

Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, Nicola Stevens, Erika Berenguer (2023). Valuing the functionality of tropical ecosystems beyond carbon. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Land-based carbon sequestration projects, such as tree planting, are a prominent strategy to offset carbon emissions. However, we risk reducing natural ecosystems to one metric – carbon. Emphasis on restoring ecosystems to balance ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and carbon sequestration is a more appropriate strategy to protect their functioning.

Aguirre‐Gutiérrez, Jesús, et al. (2019). Drier tropical forests are susceptible to functional changes in response to a long‐term drought. Ecology Letters 22.5: 855-865.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez, Jesús, et al. (2020). Long-term droughts may drive drier tropical forests towards increased functional, taxonomic and phylogenetic homogeneity. Nature Communications 11.1: 3346.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez, Jesús, et al. (2021). Pantropical modelling of canopy functional traits using Sentinel-2 remote sensing data.  Remote Sensing of Environment 252: 112122.

Aguirre‐Gutiérrez, Jesús, et al. (2022). Functional susceptibility of tropical forests to climate change. Nature Ecology & Evolution 6.7: 878-889..