Pantropical geography of lightning-caused disturbance and its implications for tropical forests

Lightning is a major agent of disturbance, but its ecological effects in the tropics are unquantified.  Here, we used ground and satellite sensors to quantify the geography of lightning strikes in terrestrial tropical ecosystems, and to evaluate whether spatial variation in lightning frequency is associated with variation in tropical forest structure and dynamics.  Between 2013 and 2018, tropical terrestrial ecosystems received an average of 100.4 million lightning strikes per year, and the frequency of strikes was spatially autocorrelated at local-to-continental scales.  Lightning strikes were more frequent in forests, savannas, and urban areas than in grasslands, shrublands, and croplands.  Higher lightning frequency was positively associated with woody biomass turnover and negatively associated with aboveground biomass and the density of large trees (trees ha-1) in forests across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.  Extrapolating from the only tropical forest study that comprehensively a...

雷电是一类主要的生态干扰因子，但目前学界尚未量化其在热带生态系统中的生态效应。本研究依托地面与卫星传感器，量化了陆地热带生态系统内雷击（lightning strike）事件的空间分布格局，并探究雷击频率的空间差异是否与热带森林的结构及动态变化存在关联。2013至2018年间，全球陆地热带生态系统年均遭受雷击1.004亿次，且雷击频率在局地至洲际尺度上呈现空间自相关（spatial autocorrelation）特征。相较于草原、灌丛与农田，森林、稀树草原（savanna）及城市区域的雷击频率更高。在非洲、亚洲及美洲的森林中，更高的雷击频率与木本生物量周转（woody biomass turnover）呈正相关，而与地上生物量（aboveground biomass）及大型树木每公顷株数（trees ha⁻¹）呈负相关。本研究基于目前仅有的一项综合性热带森林研究进行外推……