Pubblicazioni

The increase in severity of droughts associated with greater mortality and reduced vegetation growth is one of the main threats to tropical forests. Drought resilience of tropical forests is affected by multiple biotic and abiotic factors varying at differ -ent scales. Identifying those factors can help understanding the resilience to ongoing and future climate change. Altitude leads to high climate variation and to different forest formations, principally moist or dry tropical forests with contrasted vegeta -tion structure. Each tropical forest can show distinct responses to droughts. Locally, topography is also a key factor controlling biotic and abiotic factors related to drought resilience in each forest type. Here, we show that topography has key roles control -ling biotic and abiotic factors in each forest type. The most important abiotic factorsare soil nutrients, water availability, and microclimate. The most important biotic fac -tors are leaf economic and hydraulic plant traits, and vegetation structure. Both dry tropical forests and ridges (steeper and drier habitats) are more sensitive to droughts than moist tropical forest and valleys (flatter and wetter habitats). The higher mortal -ity in ridges suggests that conservative traits are not sufficient to protect plants from drought in drier steeper habitats. Our synthesis highlights that altitude and topogra-phy gradients are essential to understand mechanisms of tropical forest's resilience to future drought events. We described important factors related to drought resilience, however, many important knowledge gaps remain. Filling those gaps will help improve future practices and studies about mitigation capacity, conservation, and restoration of tropical ecosystems.