Recovering tropical forest resilience in the Anthropocene

We now live in the Anthropocene, marking human dominance of the Earth system. Tropical forests perform vital functions in this system, including massive carbon storage, but they are under increasing pressure by deforestation, fires, and global climate change. Meanwhile, however, forest restoration is gaining momentum. These human-driven changes transform the resilience of tropical forests to droughts and fires. When a forest lacks resilience, local feedbacks involving fire can prevent recovery of the canopy. Importantly, this could trigger a regional chain reaction: when trees photosynthesize, they pump moisture into the atmosphere, subsequently enhancing regional rainfall levels and thus improving forest resilience. Therefore, to maintain the functioning of the tropical rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo, and south-east Asia in the Anthropocene, we need to understand the interplay between local-scale forest resilience and regional moisture flows for different climates and land-use changes. Fortunately, due to recent advances in atmospheric moisture tracking and remote sensing, it is now possible to analyze in high detail how local-scale resilience is regionally interconnected by forest-induced atmospheric moisture flows. In addition, coordinated efforts in climate- and integrated assessment modeling enable the integration with mutually consistent climate- and socioeconomic scenarios. Combined, these developments create the exciting opportunity to investigate how tropical forest resilience would restructure depending on the future trajectory of the Anthropocene. I thus propose to study: first, how local-scale forest resilience across the tropics is interconnected through forest-induced atmospheric moisture flows; second, how these interconnections change in different coupled climate- and socioeconomic scenarios; third, how fires affect regional rainfall, thus feeding back to fire risk; and fourth, where and how forest restoration enhances regional forest resilience in mentioned scenarios. This research will enable identifying areas across the tropics where forest protection and targeted forest restoration would generate the greatest benefits to forest resilience in the Anthropocene.