This data package contains data from: Sensitivity of tropical woodland savannas to El Niño droughts
This dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.).
When using this data, please cite the original article:
Simone Matias Reis, Yadvinder Malhi, Ben Hur Marimon Junior, Beatriz Schwantes Marimon, Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng, Igor Araújo, Renata Freitag, Edmar Almeida de Oliveira, Karine da Silva Peixoto, Luciana Januário de Souza, Ediméia Laura Souza da Silva, Eduarda Bernardes Santos, Kamila Parreira da Silva, Maélly Dállet Alves Gonçalves, Cécile Girardin, Cecilia Dahlsjö, Oliver Phillips, Imma Oliveras Menor. 2025. Sensitivity of tropical woodland savannas to El Niño droughts. Biogeosciences.
Additionally, please cite the data package:
Data from "Simone Matias Reis, Yadvinder Malhi, Ben Hur Marimon Junior, Beatriz Schwantes Marimon, Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng, Igor Araújo, Renata Freitag, Edmar Almeida de Oliveira, Karine da Silva Peixoto, Luciana Januário de Souza, Ediméia Laura Souza da Silva, Eduarda Bernardes Santos, Kamila Parreira da Silva, Maélly Dállet Alves Gonçalves, Cécile Girardin, Cecilia Dahlsjö, Oliver Phillips, Imma Oliveras Menor. 2025. Sensitivity of tropical woodland savannas to El Niño droughts. Biogeosciences. DOI: "
ForestPlots.NET DOI:
Abstract
The 205-206 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 (cerrado) and transitional forest-savanna (cerradão), continuously tracked before, during, and after the El Niño. We carried out intensive monitoring between 204 and 209 of the productivity of key vegetation components (stems, leaves, roots). Cerradão productivity declined strongly by 29% during the El Niño event. The most impacted component was stem productivity, reducing by 58%. By contrast, cerrado productivity varied little over the years, and while the most affected component was fine roots, declining by 38% during the event, fine root productivity recovered soon after the El Niño. The two vegetation types also showed contrasting patterns in the allocation of productivity to canopy, wood, and fine-root production. Our findings demonstrate that cerradão can show low resistance and resilience to climatic disturbances due to the slow recovery of productivity. This suggests that the transitional Amazon-Cerrado ecosystems between South America’s largest biomes may be particularly vulnerable to drought enhanced by climate change.
Keywords: 205-206 El Niño, productivity, productivity allocation, climate events, cerradão, cerrado.
