Regional and historical factors supplement current climate in shaping global forest canopy height
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Canopy height is a key factor that affects carbon storage, vegetation productivity and biodiversity in forests, as well as an indicator of key processes such as biomass allocation. However, global variation in forest canopy height and its determinants are poorly known. We used global data on Light Detection and Ranging‐derived maximum forest canopy height ( H max ) to test hypotheses relating H max to current climate (water availability, ambient energy and water–energy dynamics), regional evolutionary and biogeographic history, historical climate change, and human disturbance. We derived H max for 32 304 forested 55‐km grid cells using 1‐km global canopy height data (maximum height of 1‐km cells within a 55‐km grid). Variation in H max was related to latitude and biomes, along with environmental and historical variables. Both spatial and non‐spatial linear models were used to assess the relative importance of the different hypothesized factors. H max was inversely related to latitude (i.e. tall canopies at the equator), but with high geographical variability. Actual evapotranspiration and annual precipitation were the factors most correlated to H max globally, thus supporting the water–energy dynamics hypothesis. However, water limitation emerged as a key factor in tropical and temperate biomes within specific geographic regions, while energy limitation was a more important factor in boreal regions where temperature is more limiting to trees than water. H max exhibited strong variation among biogeographic regions, supporting the role of regional evolutionary and biogeographic history in structuring broad‐scale patterns in canopy height. Furthermore, there were divergent relationships between climate and H max between the Southern and Northern Hemispheres, consistent with historical evolutionary contingencies modulating these relationships. Historical climate change was also related to H max , albeit not as strongly, with shorter canopy heights where late‐Quaternary climate has been less stable. In contrast, human disturbance was only weakly related to H max at the scale (55 km) examined here. Synthesis . This study confirms that forest canopy height is strongly controlled by current climate, but also provides evidence for an important supplementary role for regional–historical factors. This highlights the importance of considering evolutionary and biogeographic history for achieving a comprehensive understanding of forest ecosystem properties.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".