Regional ecotypes structure biogeography of Amazon forest drought resilience and vulnerability

Amazonia contains the most extensive tropical forests on Earth, but the role of the region as a carbon appears to be declining. Increasing deforestation, fire and climate change-associated increases in drought, threaten to push forests past a tipping point. However, forests are complex, exhibiting drought responses indicative of both resilience (photosynthetic “greening”) and vulnerability (browning and tree mortality) that are difficult to explain by climate variation alone. Still needed is a framework for understanding and predicting how different regions will respond to different kinds of future drought. Here, we combine remotely-sensed photosynthetic vegetation indices (enhanced vegetation index, EVI, corrected for sun-sensor geometry; and solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, SIF) with ground-based tree demography to test recent ecological hypotheses about forest drought resilience and vulnerability for different forest ecotypes across the basin, defined by their water-table depth, soil fertility and vegetation characteristics. In high-fertility southern Amazonia, drought response was importantly structured by water-table depth, with resilient greening in shallow-water-table-forests (where greater water availability heightened responsiveness to excess sunlight) contrasting with vulnerability (“browning” and excess tree mortality) over deeper water tables. Notably, shallow-water-table-forest resilience weakened as droughts lengthened. By contrast, low-fertility northern Amazonia, with slower-growing but drought-hardy trees (or tall trees, with deep-rooted water access), supported more drought-resilient forests independent of water-table depth. This work reveals a new biogeography of forest drought response that provides a framework for conservation decisions and improved prediction of heterogeneous forest responses to future climate changes, but warns that longer/more frequent droughts undermine these multiple ecohydrological strategies of Amazon forest resilience.