Marijn Bauters

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Environment

The Ruki is a pristine blackwater tributary in the Congo Basin draining tropical lowland forest. Daily discharge and fortnightly concentrations, isotopic ratios, and molecular composition of carbon and organic matter were measured for 1 yr (2019–2020). Like the Congo River, discharge peaked from November–January, with a smaller secondary peak in Ju...

Congo Basin, with two tree species, four tree planting densities (T 1 : 2500 trees × ha −1 , T 2 : 625 trees × ha −1 , T 3 : 278 trees × ha −1 ; and T 0 : crop monoculture), and three intercrops (cassava, maize, and peanut). The results revealed that both agroforestry species did not significantly differ regarding their impact on soil macronutrient...

Meteorological stations are rare in central Africa, which leads to uncertainty in regional climatic trends. This is particularly problematic for the Congo Basin, where station coverage decreased significantly during the last few decades. Here, we present a digitized dataset of daily temperature and precipitation from the Yangambi biosphere reserve,...

Tropical montane forests store high amounts of soil organic carbon (SOC). However, global warming may affect these stocks via enhanced soil respiration. Improved insight into the temperature response of SOC respiration can be obtained from in and ex situ warming studies. In situ warming via translocation of intact soil mesocosms was carried out alo...

Questions Ecological succession is the process during which ecosystems recover after disturbances. Studies investigating community reassembly during tropical forest succession have rarely compared lianas to trees. We addressed two questions: (1) how do changes in stem density, total basal area and species richness of lianas and trees compare throug...

Spatial redistribution of nutrients by atmospheric transport and deposition could theoretically act as a continental‐scale mechanism which counteracts declines in soil fertility caused by nutrient lock‐up in accumulating biomass in tropical forests in Central Africa. However, to what extent it affects carbon sinks in forests remains elusive. Here w...

jats:p>Abstract. Climate change has the potential to increase surface ozone (O3) concentrations, known as the “ozone–climate penalty”, through changes to atmospheric chemistry, transport and dry deposition. In the tropics, the response of surface O3 to changing climate is relatively understudied but has important consequences for air pollution and...

Measurement(s) Bark thickness • Leaf area • Leaf aluminium (Al) content per leaf dry mass • Specific leaf area • Leaf calcium (Ca) content per leaf dry mass • Leaf carbon (C) content per leaf dry mass • Leaf carbon (C) isotope signature (delta 13 C) • Leaf compoundness • Leaf dry mass per leaf fresh mass (leaf dry matter content, LDMC) • Leaf magne...

Fungi are highly diverse organisms, which provide multiple ecosystem services. However, compared with charismatic animals and plants, the distribution patterns and conservation needs of fungi have been little explored. Here we used high‐resolution sequencing to assess endemicity patterns, global change vulnerability and conservation priority areas...

Meteorological stations are rare in the tropics and satellite products often do not perform optimal. This leads to uncertainty in modelled regional climatic trends and may lead to opposing trends in prediction of future climate. This is particularly problematic for the Congo basin, where station coverage decreased significantly during the last few...

The lack of field-based data in the tropics limits our mechanistic understanding of the drivers of net primary productivity (NPP) and allocation. Specifically, the role of local edaphic factors - such as soil parent material and topography controlling soil fertility as well as water and nutrient fluxes - remains unclear and introduces substantial u...

Tropical montane forests store large amounts of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) in soil. These soil C, N, and P pools are vulnerable to increased losses due to the increasing local temperatures. To gain better insight into the effects of climate warming on biogeochemistry in montane forests in Africa, we established study plots along a...

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is one of the most recognized global patterns of species richness exhibited across a wide range of taxa. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed in the past two centuries to explain LDG, but rigorous tests of the drivers of LDGs have been limited by a lack of high-quality global species richness data. Here we...

Secondary forests constitute an increasingly important component of tropical forests worldwide. Although cycling of essential nutrients affects recovery trajectories of secondary forests, the effect of nutrient limitation on forest regrowth is poorly constrained. Here we use three lines of evidence from secondary forest succession sequences in cent...

Anthropogenic nitrogen inputs cause major negative environmental impacts, including emissions of the important greenhouse gas N 2 O. Despite their importance, shifts in terrestrial N loss pathways driven by global change are highly uncertain. Here we present a coupled soil-atmosphere isotope model (IsoTONE) to quantify terrestrial N losses and N 2...

Aquatic losses of nutrients are important loss vectors in the nutrient budgets of tropical forests. Traditionally, research has focused mainly on losses of inorganic nutrient forms, whereas the potential contribution of organic and particulate losses to the total nutrient export budget is much less constrained. In this study, we quantified full aqu...

Agricultural intensification and forest conservation are often seen as incompatible. Agricultural interventions can help boost food security for poor rural communities but in certain cases can exacerbate deforestation, known as the rebound effect. We tested whether coupling agricultural interventions with participatory forest zoning could improve f...

The Congo basin is home to the second-largest tropical forest in the world. Therefore, it plays a crucial role in the regional water cycle, the global carbon cycle and the continental greenhouse gas balance. Yet very few field-based data on related processes exist. In the wake of global change, there is a need for a better understanding of the curr...

The net primary productivity (NPP) of tropical forests is an important component of the global terrestrial carbon (C) cycle. The lack of field-based data, however, limits our mechanistic understanding of the drivers of NPP and C allocation. In consequence, the role of local edaphic factors for forest growth and C dynamics is unclear and introduces...

Climate change has the potential to increase surface ozone (O3) concentrations, known as the ‘ozone–climate penalty’, through changes to atmospheric chemistry, transport and dry deposition. In the tropics, the response of surface O3 to changing climate is relatively understudied, but has important consequences for air pollution, human and ecosystem...

Background Across the tropics, the share of secondary versus primary forests is strongly increasing. The high rate of biomass accumulation during this secondary succession relies on the availability of essential nutrients, such as nitrogen (N). Nitrogen primarily limits many young secondary forests in the tropics. However, recent studies have shown...

Montane forests are characterized by high biodiversity, endemism, and strong elevational environmental gradients. The latter attribute makes them also suitable as a “natural laboratory” for studying the effects of environmental parameters on ecosystem functions. To provide better insight into the carbon cycle of Afromontane ecosystems, we used an e...

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we...

Background Across the tropics, the share of secondary versus primary forests is strongly increasing. The high rate of biomass accumulation during this secondary succession relies on the availability of essential nutrients, such as nitrogen (N). Nitrogen primarily limits many young secondary forests in the tropics. However, recent studies have shown...

Rock‐derived nutrients such as calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) are essential plant resources, yet depleted in highly weathered tropical soils, leading to nutrient limitation of productivity or other ecosystem processes. Despite this, substantial amounts of rock‐derived nutrients occur within wood, which raises questi...

Tropical montane forest store high amounts of soil organic carbon. However, global warming may affect these carbon stocks by enhancing soil organic carbon respiration. Better insight into temperature response of soil organic carbon respiration can be obtained from in and ex situ warming studies. In situ warming via translocation of intact soil meso...

Globally, tropical forests are assumed to be an important source of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N 2 O) and sink for methane (CH 4). Yet, although the Congo Basin comprises the second largest tropical forest and is considered the most pristine large basin left on Earth, in situ N 2 O and CH 4 flux measurements are scarce. Here, we provide multi-year...

Coffee is an important crop in the global south. However, ongoing changes in the climate system reinforce the need to quantify coffee plants' ecological and eco-physiological traits to assure coffee production in the future. One way to assess how environmental changes affect coffee performance is via leaf traits, most notably leaf carbon and nitrog...

Anthropogenic nitrogen inputs cause major negative environmental impacts, including emissions of the important greenhouse gas N2O. Despite their importance, changes in terrestrial N loss pathways driven by global change and spatial redistribution of N inputs are highly uncertain. We present a novel coupled soil-atmosphere isotope model (IsoTONE) to...

Fungi are highly important biotic components of terrestrial ecosystems, but we still have a very limited understanding about their diversity and distribution. This data article releases a global soil fungal dataset of the Global Soil Mycobiome consortium (GSMc) to boost further research in fungal diversity, biogeography and macroecology. The datase...

Studies on sediment export from tropical forest watersheds are scarce. Of the assessments that do exist, most are of larger rivers or are model-based and lack validation with measured data. Understanding the mechanisms of sediment export dynamics in forested headwaters is important for assessing downstream effects and as a baseline for net impacts...

Information on soil properties is crucial for soil preservation, the improvement of food security, and the provision of ecosystem services. In particular, for the African continent, spatially explicit information on soils and their ability to sustain these services is still scarce. To address data gaps, infrared spectroscopy has achieved great succ...

Consistent information on the current elemental composition of vegetation at global scale and the variables that determine it is lacking. To fill this gap, we gathered a total of 30912 georeferenced records on woody plants foliar concentrations of N, P, and K from published databases, and produced global maps of foliar N, P and K concentrations fo...

Tropical forests are a key component of the global carbon cycle and climate change mitigation. Field- or LiDAR-based approaches enable reliable measurements of the structure and above-ground biomass (AGB) of tropical forests. Data derived from digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) on the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform offer several advantages...

The Congo Basin's rapidly growing population still largely depends on shifting cultivation for both energy and food security. This nexus of population growth and ecological impact will continue to exacerbate landscape degradation in the coming decades. To quantify the effects of land-use intensity on soil nutrient stocks and the functional composit...

Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co‐occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provid...

Aim Elevational gradients provide excellent opportunities to explore long-term morphological and physiological responses of plants to environmental change. We determined the difference in the elevational pattern of foliar carbon isotope composition (δ¹³C) between lianas and trees, and assessed whether this difference arises from changes in photosyn...

Tropical forests store 40-50% of terrestrial vegetation carbon. Spatial variations in aboveground live tree biomass carbon (AGC) stocks remain poorly understood, in particular in tropical montane forests. Because of climatic and soil changes with increasing elevation, AGC stocks are lower in tropical montane compared to lowland forests. Here we ass...

Central African tropical forests face increasing anthropogenic pressures, particularly in the form of deforestation and land-use conversion to agriculture. The long-term effects of this transformation of pristine forests to fallow-based agroecosystems and secondary forests on biogeochemical cycles that drive forest functioning are poorly understood...

Tropical forests store 40–50 per cent of terrestrial vegetation carbon1. However, spatial variations in aboveground live tree biomass carbon (AGC) stocks remain poorly understood, in particular in tropical montane forests2. Owing to climatic and soil changes with increasing elevation3, AGC stocks are lower in tropical montane forests compared with...

Questions Human disturbance is increasingly affecting forest dynamics across the tropics. Forests can recover via natural secondary succession to pre‐disturbance levels of biodiversity, species composition, and ecosystem carbon stocks. Central Africa will be subject to increasingly high shifting‐cultivation pressure in the next decades, but success...

Litter decomposition is a key process for carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and is mainly controlled by environmental conditions, substrate quantity, and quality as well as microbial community abundance and composition. In particular, the effects of climate and atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition on litter decomposition and its...

The African Tropics are hotspots of modern-day land use change and are, at the same time, of great relevance for the cycling of carbon (C) and nutrients between plants, soils, and the atmosphere. However, the consequences of land conversion on biogeochemical cycles are still largely unknown as they are not studied in a landscape context that define...

Tropical forests are the most diverse and productive ecosystems on Earth. While better understanding of these forests is critical for our collective future, until quite recently efforts to measure and monitor them have been largely disconnected. Networking is essential to discover the answers to questions that transcend borders and the horizons of...

O objetivo foi abordar um mosaico de vegetação de savana (áreas marginais-MS e disjuntas-DS) no Cerrado Setentrional Brasileiro para investigar o papel desempenhado por fatores ambientais como determinantes da organização comunitária em escala espacial, a fim de compreender os padrões divergentes ao longo de uma gradiente ambiental. Analisamos pred...

Tropical forests are the most diverse and productive ecosystems on Earth. While better understanding of these forests is critical for our collective future, until quite recently efforts to measure and monitor them have been largely disconnected. Networking is essential to discover the answers to questions that transcend borders and the horizons of...

Tropical forests are the most diverse and productive ecosystems on Earth. While better understanding of these forests is critical for our collective future, until quite recently efforts to measure and monitor them have been largely disconnected. Networking is essential to discover the answers to questions that transcend borders and the horizons of...

Primary tropical forests generally exhibit large gaseous nitrogen (N) losses, occurring as nitric oxide (NO), nitrous oxide (N2O) or elemental nitrogen (N2). The release of N2O is of particular concern due to its high global warming potential and destruction of stratospheric ozone. Tropical forest soils are predicted to be among the largest natural...

The African Tropics are hotspots of modern-day land-use change and are, at the same time, of great relevance for the cycling of carbon (C) and nutrients between plants, soils and the atmosphere. However, the consequences of land conversion on biogeochemical cycles are still largely unknown as they are not studied in a landscape context that defines...

Nitrogen (N) availability can be highly variable in tropical forests on regional and local scales. While environmental gradients influence N cycling on a regional scale, topography is known to affect N availability on a local scale. We compared natural abundance of 15N isotopes of soil profiles in tropical lowland forest, tropical montane forest, a...

Research in environmental science relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature at around 2 meter above ground1-3. These climatic grids however fail to reflect conditions near and below the soil surface, where critical ecosystem functions such as soil carbon storage are controlled and most biodiversity resides4-8...

The semi-arid ecosystems of the African Sahel play an important role in the global carbon cycle and are among the most sensitive ecosystems to future environmental pressures. Still, basic data of photosynthetic characteristics of Sahelian vegetation are very limited, preventing us to properly understand these ecosystems and to project their respons...

Tropical forest soils are an important source and sink of greenhouse gases (GHGs), with tropical montane forests, in particular, having been poorly studied. The understanding of this ecosystem function is of vital importance for future climate change research. In this study, we explored soil fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrou...

Information on soil properties is crucial for soil preservation, improving food security, and the provision of ecosystem services. Especially, for the African continent, spatially explicit information on soils and their ability to sustain these services is still scarce. To address data gaps, infrared spectroscopy has gained great success as a cost-...

Soil respiration is an important carbon flux and key process determining the net ecosystem production of terrestrial ecosystems. To address the lack of quantification and understanding of seasonality in soil respiration of tropical forests in the Congo Basin, soil CO2 fluxes and potential controlling factors were measured annually in two dominant f...

Sustainable intensification of cocoa systems should embrace, among others, poverty alleviation and climate change policies. Using data from 710 households in Ghana, we showed that only 33 and 15% of cocoa producing families acquire sufficient income from cocoa to reach ‘living income’ according to World Bank assumptions with respectively actual yie...

Excess nitrate (NO3⁻) discharge into fresh water resources poses detrimental effects on ecosystems and human health, yet the understanding of its potential sources is lacking in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. This study integrated hydrochemistry, multi-isotope tracers (δ¹⁵N-NO3⁻, δ¹⁸O-NO3⁻, δ¹¹B) and a Bayesian mixing model (mixSIAR) to improve...

Nitrogen (N) availability can be highly variable in tropical forests on a regional and on a local scale. While environmental gradients influence N cycling on a regional scale, topography is known to affect N availability on a local scale. We compared stable isotope signatures (δ15N) of soil profiles in tropical lowland forest, tropical montane fore...

Current analyses and predictions of spatially‐explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long‐term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate‐forcing factors that operate at fine spatiote...

Atmospheric deposition is an important component of the nutrient cycles of terrestrial ecosystems, but field measurements are especially scarce in tropical regions. In this study we analysed 15 months of precipitation chemistry collected in an old growth tropical forest located in French Guiana. We measured nutrient inputs via bulk precipitation an...

Forests exhibit leaf and ecosystem level responses to environmental changes. Specifically, rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels over the past century are expected to have increased the intrinsic water‐use efficiency (iWUE) of tropical trees while the ecosystem is gradually pushed into progressive nutrient limitation. Due to the long‐term character of...

Abstract. Soil respiration is an important carbon flux and key process determining the net ecosystem production of terrestrial ecosystems. To address the enormous lack of quantification and understanding of seasonality in soil respiration of tropical forests in the Congo Basin, soil CO₂ fluxes and potential controlling factors were measu...

Tropical ecosystems and the soils therein have been reported as one of the most important and largest terrestrial carbon (C) pools and are considered important climate regulator. Carbon stabilization mechanisms in these ecosystems are often complex, as these mechanisms crucially rely on the interplay of geology, topography, climate, and biology. Fu...