Climatic controls on aboveground net primary production of tropical lowland rainforests

Aboveground net primary production (ANPP) of tropical forests is driven by soil fertility and climate, the latter receiving special attention as recent projections of global circulation models predict Mesoamerican tropics to become drier and warmer. Given the scarcity of manipulative experiments, interannual climate variations caused by El Nino Southern Oscillation have been used to assess the potential responses of tropical ANPP to projected climate change. The focus of this study was (1) to investigate how seasonal and interannual climate variations affect ANPP and the partitioning between litterfall and stem increment on three forest sites differing in soil fertility and disturbance regime in SW Costa Rica, and (2) to identify major drivers of tropical forest ANPP by integrating our results into a dataset provided by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). While forest productivity was reported to decline in areas with high precipitation and temperature, we measured among the highest stem increments and litterfall rates published to date at a site with >6000 mm mean annual precipitation (MAP) and a mean annual temperature (MAT) of 28 °C. Based on the full dataset MAP was inversely correlated with litterfall, while MAT and soil fertility promoted stem increment. Therefore the percentage of litterfall and stem increment to ANPP shifted from 80:20 in low productive tropical forests to 40:60 at forest sites with high biomass production. Our results suggest that there is a shift in the allocation of biomass towards greater nutrient conservation (i.e. production of wood biomass) in more productive tropical forests while litterfall is sustaining nutrient recycling processes in less productive forests and that this relationship is driven by climate. We finally demonstrate that both ANPP components are sensitive to seasonal and interannual climate variation at the three forest sites studied, but that the controls differ for litterfall and stem increment. While drought promoted litterfall, stem increment was positively related to monthly precipitation but negatively related to temperature. Thus, both processes peaked during different seasons, litterfall during the dry season and stem increment during the dry-wet transition period. We conclude that the balance between both ANPP processes was climate sensitive, in a spatial context (between sites) and in a temporal context (locally), between years and between seasons. Climate change may therefore shift the balance between nutrient recycling (litterfall) and carbon sequestration (wood production) and thereby adversely affect ecosystem functions of the tropical forest biome.