Oliver Lawrence Phillips

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• PhD
• Chair at University of Leeds

Alwyn Gentry’s ecological legacy is rich and vibrant. It comes from his drive to revolutionize plant identification and to apply these innovations to understand tropical forests both in detail and as a whole. It stems too from his passion for plants and forests, and the attention he gave those who shared his love for the natural world. Here I explo...

Wood density is a critical control on tree biomass, so poor understanding of its spatial variation can lead to large and systematic errors in forest biomass estimates and carbon maps. The need to understand how and why wood density varies is especially critical in tropical America where forests have exceptional species diversity and spatial turnove...

Understanding the capacity of forests to adapt to climate change is of pivotal importance for conservation science, yet this is still widely unknown. This knowledge gap is particularly acute in high-biodiversity tropical forests. Here, we examined how tropical forests of the Americas have shifted community trait composition in recent decades as a r...

Tropical forest canopies are the biosphere’s most concentrated atmospheric interface for carbon, water and energy1,2. However, in most Earth System Models, the diverse and heterogeneous tropical forest biome is represented as a largely uniform ecosystem with either a singular or a small number of fixed canopy ecophysiological properties³. This situ...

Plants cope with the environment by displaying large phenotypic variation. Two spectra of global plant form and function have been identified: a size spectrum from small to tall species with increasing stem tissue density, leaf size, and seed mass; a leaf economics spectrum reflecting slow to fast returns on investments in leaf nutrients and carbon...

Peatlands are some of the world’s most carbon-dense ecosystems and release substantial quantities of greenhouse gases when degraded. However, conserving peatlands in many tropical areas is challenging due to limited knowledge of their distribution. To address this, we surveyed soils and plant communities in Colombia’s eastern lowlands, where few pe...

Amazonian forests provide multiple ecosystem services. However, these forests are under threat mainly due to unsustainable forestry and agriculture practices. Moreover, little is known about the ecological attributes of timber species, particularly when compared to non-timber tree flora. This study aimed to classify all identified Amazonian tree sp...

Understanding how the traits of lineages are related to diversification is key for elucidating the origin of variation in species richness. Here, we test whether traits are related to species richness among lineages of trees from all major biogeographical settings of the lowland wet tropics. We explore whether variation in mortality rate, breeding...

Despite the progress in the measurement and accessibility of plant trait information, acquiring sufficiently complete data from enough species to answer broad‐scale questions in plant functional ecology and biogeography remains challenging. A common way to overcome this challenge is by imputation, or ‘gap‐filling' of trait values. This has proven a...

Rates of tree mortality are increasing globally, with implications for forests and climate. Yet, how and why these trends vary globally remain unknown. Developing a comprehensive assessment of global tree mortality will require systematically integrating data from ground-based long-term forest monitoring with large-scale remote sensing. We surveyed...

Unlike most rivers globally, nearly all lowland Amazonian rivers have unregulated flow, supporting seasonally flooded floodplain forests. Floodplain forests harbor a unique tree species assemblage adapted to flooding and specialized fauna, including fruit-eating fish that migrate seasonally into floodplains, favoring expansive floodplain areas....

Accurate biome delineation is difficult where biomes occupy the same climatic space, as is the case for tropical dry forest and savanna. The resulting confusion limits our ability to understand and manage impacts of global change on these biomes. To address this, we developed an unsupervised, repeatable method to delineate biomes and their componen...

Climate change is shifting species distributions, leading to changes in community composition and novel species assemblages worldwide. However, the responses of tropical forests to climate change across large-scale environmental gradients remain largely unexplored. Using long-term data over 66,000 trees of more than 2,500 species occurring over 3,5...

1. Understanding how functional traits are related to species diversity and ecosystem properties is a central goal of ecology. Wood density is a trait that integrates many aspects of plant form and function and is highly variable among species. Previous studies of wood density across elevational gradients have been based on limited sampling and hav...

Plant communities are composed of species that differ both in functional traits and evolutionary histories. As species’ functional traits partly result from their individual evolutionary history, we expect the functional diversity of communities to increase with increasing phylogenetic diversity. This expectation has only been tested at local scale...

Leaf and wood functional traits of trees are related to growth, reproduction, and survival, but the degree of phylogenetic conservatism in these relationships is largely unknown. In this study, we describe the variability of strategies involving leaf, wood and demographic characteristics for tree genera distributed across the Amazon Region, and qua...

The density of wood is a key indicator of the carbon investment strategies of trees, impacting productivity and carbon storage. Despite its importance, the global variation in wood density and its environmental controls remain poorly understood, preventing accurate predictions of global forest carbon stocks. Here we analyse information from 1.1 mil...

The increase in Earth observations from space in recent years supports improved quantification of carbon storage by terrestrial vegetation and fosters studies that relate satellite measurements to biomass retrieval algorithms. However, satellite observations are only indirectly related to the carbon stored by vegetation. While ground surveys provid...

Tree growth and longevity trade-offs fundamentally shape the terrestrial carbon balance. Yet, we lack a unified understanding of how such trade-offs vary across the world’s forests. By mapping life history traits for a wide range of species across the Americas, we reveal considerable variation in life expectancies from 10 centimeters in diameter (r...

We describe the geographical variation in tree species composition across Amazonian forests and show how environmental conditions are associated with species turnover. Our analyses are based on 2023 forest inventory plots (1 ha) that provide abundance data for a total of 5188 tree species. Within-plot species composition reflected both local enviro...

The negative impacts of illegal logging and associated trade (ILAT) on forest carbon and species biodiversity have been widely recognized for decades. Despite several decades of attempts to halt illegal logging through policies such as those advocated by the European Union (The Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade, FLEGT), there has been li...

The 2015–2016 El Niño event led to one of the most intense and hottest droughts for many tropical forests, profoundly impacting forest productivity. However, we know little about how this event affected the Cerrado, the largest savanna in South America. Here we report 5 years of productivity of the dominant vegetation types in Cerrado, savanna (cer...

Human activities exert pronounced influence on forest ecosystems, impacting biodiversity and functions across multiple scales. However, the consequences of low-intensity human activities on tropical forest ecosystems are difficult to assess and remain poorly explored. The influence of human activities and other site-specific variables on forest tre...

The uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) by terrestrial ecosystems is critical for moderating climate change¹. To provide a ground-based long-term assessment of the contribution of forests to terrestrial CO2 uptake, we synthesized in situ forest data from boreal, temperate and tropical biomes spanning three decades. We found that the carbon sink in globa...

Already threatened by deforestation, the Brazilian Cerrado—a complex and biodiverse tropical savannah that provides important ecosystem services—could experience climate warming of 1–5°C by 2100. This could negatively impact sexual reproduction (considered particularly sensitive to temperature stress) in native plant species, potentially limiting t...

The negative impacts of illegal logging and associated trade (ILAT) on forest carbon and species biodiversity have been widely recognized for decades. Despite several decades of attempts to halt illegal logging through policies such as those advocated by the European Union (The Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade, FLEGT), there has been li...

The emergence of alternative stable states in forest systems has significant implications for the functioning and structure of the terrestrial biosphere, yet empirical evidence remains scarce. Here, we combine global forest biodiversity observations and simulations to test for alternative stable states in the presence of evergreen and deciduous for...

Human activities exert a pronounced influence on forest ecosystems, impacting both biodiversity and function across multiple scales. Despite this, the consequences of low-intensity human activities on tropical forest ecosystems are difficult to assess and, therefore, remain poorly explored. Here, the influence of human activities and other site-spe...

Amazonia’s floodplain system is the largest and most biodiverse on Earth. Although forests are crucial to the ecological integrity of floodplains, our understanding of their species composition and how this may differ from surrounding forest types is still far too limited, particularly as changing inundation regimes begin to reshape floodplain tree...

The density of wood is a key indicator of trees’ carbon investment strategies, impacting productivity and carbon storage. Despite its importance, the global variation in wood density and its environmental controls remain poorly understood, preventing accurate predictions of global forest carbon stocks. Here, we analyze information from 1.1 million...

Aim: Amazonia hosts more tree species from numerous evolutionary lineages, both young and ancient, than any other biogeographic region. Previous studies have shown that tree lineages colonized multiple edaphic environments and dispersed widely across Amazonia, leading to a hypothesis, which we test, that lineages should not be strongly associated w...

Linking individual and stand-level dynamics during forest devel­­opment reveals a scaling relationship between mean tree size and tree density in forest stands, which integrates forest structure and function. However, the nature of this so-called scaling law and its variation across broad spatial scales remains unquantified and its linkage with for...

Growing evidence suggests that liana competition with trees is threatening the global carbon sink by slowing the recovery of forests following disturbance. A recent theory based on local and regional evidence further proposes that the competitive success of lianas over trees is driven by interactions between forest disturbance and climate. We prese...

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we inve...

Aim To determine the relationships between the functional trait composition of forest communities and environmental gradients across scales and biomes and the role of species relative abundances in these relationships. Location Global. Time period Recent. Major taxa studied Trees. Methods We integrated species abundance records from worldw...

Dominance of neotropical tree communities by a few species is widely documented, but dominant trees show a variety of distributional patterns still poorly understood. Here, we used 503 forest inventory plots (93,719 individuals ≥2.5 cm diameter, 2609 species) to explore the relationships between local abundance, regional frequency and spatial aggre...

Linking individual and stand-level dynamics during forest development reveals a scaling relationship between mean tree size and tree density in forest stands, which integrates forest structure and function. However, the nature of this so-called scaling law and its variation across broad spatial scales remains unquantified and its linkage with fores...

Forests are a substantial terrestrial carbon sink, but anthropogenic changes in land use and climate have considerably reduced the scale of this system¹. Remote-sensing estimates to quantify carbon losses from global forests2–5 are characterized by considerable uncertainty and we lack a comprehensive ground-sourced evaluation to benchmark these est...

ARTICLE Mapping density, diversity and species-richness of the Amazon tree flora Using 2.046 botanically-inventoried tree plots across the largest tropical forest on Earth, we mapped tree species-diversity and tree species-richness at 0.1-degree resolution, and investigated drivers for diversity and richness. Using only location, stratified by fore...

The need to measure, monitor, and understand our living planet is greater than ever. Yet, while many technologies are applied to tackle this need, one developed in the 19th century is transforming tropical ecology. Permanent plots, in which forests are directly sensed tree-by-tree and species-by-species, already provide a global public good. They c...

Understanding what controls global leaf type variation in trees is crucial for comprehending their role in terrestrial ecosystems, including carbon, water and nutrient dynamics. Yet our understanding of the factors influencing forest leaf types remains incomplete, leaving us uncertain about the global proportions of needle-leaved, broadleaved, ever...

La conceptualización de las especies maderables es esencial para estrategias de conservación e iniciativas de manejo forestal sostenible. Investigaciones previas han denotado a una especie maderable como especie “multipropósito”, “útil” o “comercial”. Sin embargo, no se ha revisado a profundidad esta definición actual. Los objetivos de esta revisió...

Indigenous societies are known to have occupied the Amazon basin for more than 12,000 years, but the scale of their influence on Amazonian forests remains uncertain. We report the discovery, using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) information from across the basin, of 24 previously undetected pre-Columbian earthworks beneath the forest canopy. Mo...

Evolutionary radiations of woody taxa within arid environments were made possible by multiple trait innovations including deep roots and embolism‐resistant xylem, but little is known about how these traits have coevolved across the phylogeny of woody plants or how they jointly influence the distribution of species. We synthesized global trait and v...

The tropical forest carbon sink is known to be drought sensitive, but it is unclear which forests are the most vulnerable to extreme events. Forests with hotter and drier baseline conditions may be protected by prior adaptation, or more vulnerable because they operate closer to physiological limits. Here we report that forests in drier South Americ...

Los bosques pre-montanos y montanos son poco estudiados y su composición florística es muy poco conocida, aunque últimamente aquí se han descubierto nuevas especies de árboles. Describimos la diversidad, composición florística y estructura del bosque en 13 parcelas permanentes de 1 ha, evaluadas en el 2018 en el Transecto Yanachaga en el centro del...

Determining the drivers of non-native plant invasions is critical for managing native ecosystems and limiting the spread of invasive species1,2. Tree invasions in particular have been relatively overlooked, even though they have the potential to transform ecosystems and economies3,4. Here, leveraging global tree databases5-7, we explore how the phy...

Graphical abstract Highlights d Ecological metadata were compiled for 7,694 sites across the Brazilian Amazon d Accessibility and proximity to research facilities influenced research probability d Knowledge gaps are greater in uplands than in wetlands and aquatic habitats d Undersampled areas overlap predicted hotspots of climate change and defores...

LLianas (woody vines) are important components of tropical forests and are known to compete with host trees for resources, decrease tree growth and increase tree mortality. Given the observed increases in liana abundance in some forests and their impacts on forest function, an integrated understanding of carbon dynamics of lianas and liana-infested...

We compiled and presented a dataset (named "MADERA") for all timber species reported in the Amazon region from all nine South American Amazonian countries. This work was based on official information from every country and on two substantial scientific references. Our final Amazonian timber species dataset contains 1,112 unique species records, whi...

Los bosques pre-montanos y montanos son poco estudiados y su composición florística es muy poco conocida, aunque últimamente aquí se han descubierto nuevas especies de árboles. Describimos la diversidad, composición florística y estructura del bosque en 13 parcelas permanentes de 1 ha, evaluadas en el 2018 en el Transecto Yanachaga en el Perú (400...

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time, and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space. While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environme...

We compiled and presented a dataset for all timber species reported in the Amazon region from all nine South American Amazonian countries. This was based on official information from every country, as well as from two substantial scientific references. We verified the standard taxonomic names from each individual source, using the Taxonomic Name Re...

For more than three decades, major efforts in sampling and analyzing tree diversity in South America have focused almost exclusively on trees with stems of at least 10 and 2.5 cm diameter, showing highest species diversity in the wetter western and northern Amazon forests. By contrast, little attention has been paid to patterns and drivers of diver...

• As pesquisas ecológicas e a compilação e curadoria de dados científicos são atividades fundamentais para a compreensão das mudanças na biodiversidade da Amazônia; • As pesquisas ecológicas ainda estão concentradas em locais mais acessíveis e próximos às instituições de pesquisa; • A Amazônia é a região do país que menos recebe investimento para p...

Phytolith analysis is a well-established archaeobotanical tool, having provided important insights into pre-Columbian crop cultivation and domestication across Amazonia through the Holocene. Yet, its use as a palaeoecological tool is in its infancy in Amazonia and its effectiveness for reconstructing pre-Columbian land-use beyond archaeological sit...

1. Biodiversity is an important component of natural ecosystems, with higher species richness often correlating with an increase in ecosystem productivity. Yet, this relationship varies substantially across environments, typically becoming less pronounced at high levels of species richness. However, species richness alone cannot reflect all importa...

Aim Theoretical, experimental and observational studies have shown that biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships are influenced by functional community structure through two mutually non‐exclusive mechanisms: (1) the dominance effect (which relates to the traits of the dominant species); and (2) the niche partitioning effect [which re...

Tropical forests face increasing climate risk1,2, yet our ability to predict their response to climate change is limited by poor understanding of their resistance to water stress. Although xylem embolism resistance thresholds (for example, [Formula: see text]50) and hydraulic safety margins (for example, HSM50) are important predictors of drought-i...

Climate change is being intensified by anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gasses, highlighting the value of forests for carbon dioxide storing carbon in their biomass. Seasonally dry tropical forests are a neglected, threatened, but potentially critical biome for helping mitigate climate change. In South Amer-ica, knowing the amount and distribut...

The Caatinga biome in Brazil comprises the largest and most continuous expanse of the seasonally dry tropical forest (SDTF) worldwide; nevertheless, it is among the most threatened and least studied, despite its ecological and biogeographical importance. The spatial distribution of volumetric wood stocks in the Caatinga and the relationship with en...

Premise: Understanding tree species' responses to drought is critical for predicting the future of tropical forests, especially in regions where the climate is changing rapidly. Methods: We compared the anatomical and functional traits of the dominant tree species of two tropical forests in Southern Amazonia, one on deep, well-drained soils (cer...

In a time of rapid global change, the question of what determines patterns in species abundance distribution remains a priority for understanding the complex dynamics of ecosystems. The constrained maximization of information entropy provides a framework for the understanding of such complex systems dynamics by a quantitative analysis of important...

Drought and fire reduce productivity and increase tree mortality in tropical forests. Fires also produce pyrogenic carbon (PyC), which persists in situ for centuries to millennia, and represents a legacy of past fires, potentially improving soil fertility and water holding capacity and selecting for the survival and recruitment of certain tree life...

Logging puts the Amazon rainforest region at risk, and although there are conservation efforts, a regional consensus list of timber species, does not exist. Here, we assembled the first harmonized timber species database for the Amazon region by using national timber species data from the nine Amazonian countries. All tree timber species names were...

Recent observations suggest that the large carbon sink in mature and recovering forests may be strongly limited by nitrogen1–3. Nitrogen-fixing trees (fixers) in symbiosis with bacteria provide the main natural source of new nitrogen to tropical forests3,4. However, abundances of fixers are tightly constrained5–7, highlighting the fundamental unans...

Many natural forests in Southeast Asia are degraded following decades of logging. Restoration of these forests is delayed by ongoing logging and tropical cyclones, but the implications for recovery are largely uncertain. We analysed meteorological, satellite and forest inventory plot data to assess the effect of Typhoon Doksuri, a major tropical cy...

Forests contribute to climate change mitigation through carbon storage and uptake, but the extent to which this carbon pool varies in space and time is still poorly known. Several Earth Observation missions have been specifically designed to address this issue, e.g. NASA's GEDI, NASA-ISRO's NISAR and ESA's BIOMASS. Yet, all these missions' products...

Although tropical forests differ substantially in form and function, they are often represented as a single biome in global change models, hindering understanding of how different tropical forests will respond to environmental change. The response of the tropical forest biome to environmental change is strongly influenced by forest type. Forest typ...

Aim To investigate the geographic patterns and ecological correlates in the geographic distribution of the most common tree dispersal modes in Amazonia (endozoochory, synzoochory, anemochory and hydrochory). We examined if the proportional abundance of these dispersal modes could be explained by the availability of dispersal agents (disperser‐avail...