Global Partners, Local Data, and the Paradox of Biodiversity and Human Well-Being

Tropical forests store more carbon in vegetation than any other terrestrial ecosystem.  Tropical biodiversity and human livelihoods are inextricably linked. Forest structure and biodiversity are threatened by a variety of stressors, including habitat loss and climate change.  Understanding the role of biodiversity on key ecosystem services requires large-scale, multi-site, standardized observational studies.  Understanding how patterns biodiversity may shift as a function of dimension (taxonomic, phylogenetic, functional) across different scales is key. To address these intersections, we used data from the Terrestrial Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network - four NGOs, 15 countries and 85 partners - providing locally collected, multi-channeled biodiversity data from 17 tropical forest sites around the world.  TEAM data allow for global-to-regional scale comparisons as sites are stratified along expected gradients of projected climate change, land use change, and precipitation seasonality. We found weak, but significant, relationships between carbon storage, and both species richness and Shannon Index; however, these appear to be driven by environmental correlates along the major gradients within the dataset.  No clear relationships existed between functional diversity and carbon storage.  Rather, our results support the idea that functional dominance is more important than taxonomic or functional diversity in influencing carbon storage.  At regional and global scales well beyond the individual site, analyses also revealed significant tradeoffs between biodiversity, carbon storage, and land-use. Focused work along an altitudinal gradient in the Peruvian Andes (Manu) revealed that simple relationships between biodiversity dimensions and abiotic forcing factors were system, and taxon, specific.  General patterns of decline in species richness with elevation were sometimes (rodents) but not always (birds, bats) repeated in phylogenetic and/or functional diversity, stressing the importance of system structure (forest type) over simpler clines in temperature or precipitation. A comparison of TEAM tree diversity data with active remote sensing imagery (LIDAR) suggests that there is a strong relationship between forest three-dimensional structure and taxonomic diversity (Shannon Index), but that the sign of the relationship changes along the altitudinal gradient.  Thus LIDAR may corroborate on-the-ground data, but to different degrees in highland and lowland areas.