Understanding if and how tropical forests can adapt to a changing climate is pivotal to our understanding of anthropogenic impacts on the ecosystem. I take a functional traits approach to disentangle how tropical forests in West Africa have shifted their trait composition through time as an adaptation to a changing environment.
Increasing land use change from forest to cocoa plantation and illegal logging have increased the fragmentation of forests and likely caused a decrease in their species and functional trait composition across the last decades.
https://www.jesusaguirre-spatialecology.com
https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/jaguirregutierrez.html