Publications

Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, Sandra Díaz, Sami W. Rifai et al. (2025). Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change. Nature.

Species are expected to shift their ranges as the climate changes, but shifts may not occur fast enough, especially for immobile species such as plants. Two papers in this issue assess the degree to which plant species are tracking climate change in the American tropics, where data availability has constrained inference. Ramírez-Barahona et al. show that in Mesoamerican cloud forests, climate change and deforestation together have led to a mean upward shift in species ranges since 1979, mainly due to contracting lower range edges. In tropical forests across the Americas, Aguirre-Gutiérrez et al. found that tree traits are not shifting fast enough to track climate change based on trait-climate relationships, with smaller shifts in montane forests

Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, Sami W. Rifai, Xiongjie Deng, Hans ter Steege, Eleanor Thomson, Yadvinder Malhi, et al. (2025). Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests. Nature.

Tropical forest canopies are the biosphere’s most concentrated atmospheric interface for carbon, water and energy. However, in most Earth System Models, the diverse and heterogeneous tropical forest biome is represented as a largely uniform ecosystem with either a singular or a small number of fixed canopy ecophysiological properties. This situation arises, in part, from a lack of understanding about how and why the functional properties of tropical forest canopies vary geographically4. Here, by combining field-collected data from more than 1,800 vegetation plots and tree traits with satellite remote-sensing, terrain, climate and soil data, we predict variation across 13 morphological, structural and chemical functional traits of trees, and use this to compute and map the functional diversity of tropical forests. Our findings reveal that the tropical Americas, Africa and Asia tend to occupy different portions of the total functional trait space available across tropical forests. Tropical American forests are predicted to have 40% greater functional richness than tropical African and Asian forests. Meanwhile, African forests have the highest functional divergence—32% and 7% higher than that of tropical American and Asian forests, respectively. An uncertainty analysis highlights priority regions for further data collection, which would refine and improve these maps. Our predictions represent a ground-based and remotely enabled global analysis of how and why the functional traits of tropical forest canopies vary across space.

Kumeh, E.M (2024). The political ecology of cocoa agroforestry and implications for equitable land use in rural Ghana.. Agroforest Syst.

The relevance of cocoa agroforestry is widely discussed in debates on sustainability transition in cocoa, especially in the context of ending hunger and poverty among cocoa farmers. Whereas this has led to multiple cocoa agroforestry investments by NGOs, governments, and cocoa and chocolate companies in West and Central Africa, a notable gap exists in the literature on how these interventions respond to the needs of cocoa farmers who are typically framed as the primary target of equity in cocoa sustainability discussions. This paper contributes to bridging this gap by analyzing equity in implementing various cocoa agroforestry projects by different actors in Ghana’s Juabeso-Bia Landscape (JBL)

Kumeh, Eric Mensah. (2023). How agroecology can help build dynamic cocoa agroforests in Ghana.. Agroforestry at work .

This article describes the transformative potential of agroecology as a beacon of hope for reestablishing balance in Ghana’s cocoa-forest mosaic landscapes. Agroecology — rooted in the principles of ecological harmony and sustainable agriculture — offers a way to revive and restore biodiversity, empower farmers and ensure a resilient and thriving future for cocoa farms.

Boonman, C.C.F., Serra-Diaz, J.M., Hoeks, S., Guo, W-Y., Enquist, B.J., , B., Malhi, Y., Merow, C., Buitenwerf, R., Svenning, J-C. (2024). More than 17,000 tree species are at risk from rapid global change.. Nature Communication.

Trees are pivotal to global biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, yet accelerating global changes threaten global tree diversity, making accurate species extinction risk assessments necessary. To identify species that require expert-based re-evaluation, we assess exposure to change in six anthropogenic threats over the last two decades for 32,090 tree species. We estimated that over half (54.2%) of the assessed species have been exposed to increasing threats. Only 8.7% of these species are considered threatened by the IUCN Red List, whereas they include more than half of the Data Deficient species (57.8%). These findings suggest a substantial underestimation of threats and associated extinction risk for tree species in current assessments. We also map hotspots of tree species exposed to rapidly changing threats around the world. Our data-driven approach can strengthen the efforts going into expert-based IUCN Red List assessments by facilitating prioritization among species for re-evaluation, allowing for more efficient conservation efforts.

Mapping niches of extension service providers to support nature recovery – a policy briefing

This policy brief sets out the role of agricultural extension services in supporting landscape-scale nature recovery through a novel method of mapping organisational niches and conflicts in service provision.  It uses an example of advice on water pollution, and proposes changes to the provision of advice by organisations.

The Niche Mapper Analytical Framework – technical report

This technical report presents the Niche Mapper analytical framework for visualising the landscape of advice provision for nature recovery. Land managers access advice on land-use changes to support nature recovery, with advice offered by numerous organisations. Organisations have unique motivations for advice provision e.g., regulatory, environmental or financial, leading to crowding within the sector. The Niche Mapper framework, when applied to a set of advisory organisations will produce a visual representation of the niches occupied by those organisations. The framework may be applied at a variety of spatial scales and/or temporal intervals, resulting in analytically comparable outputs.

The results provided by using this framework can support effective policy making and divulge new research directions. An example of how the framework has been applied is illustrated in a case study of organisations providing advice to land managers for the mitigation of diffuse water pollution from agriculture (DWPA).

Oxfordshire’s greenspace-deprived neighbourhoods

Coordinating author: Martha Crockatt

This report explores Natural England’s Green Infrastructure data to identify neighbourhoods in Oxfordshire experiencing both socio-economic deprivation and poor provision of accessible greenspace, with a view to these neighbourhoods being prioritised in terms of planning, allocation of funding, and effort for improving quality and quantity of accessible greenspace.

Contributors: Matt Witney (Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership), Alison Smith (University of Oxford), Rosie Rowe (Oxfordshire County Council), Mark Hirons (University of Oxford),  Constance McDermott (University of Oxford), Camilla Burrow (Wild Oxfordshire) and Joseph Gent (University of Oxford).

Oxfordshire’s greenspace-deprived neighbourhoods

A new report which has just been launched explores Natural England’s Green Infrastructure data to identify neighbourhoods in Oxfordshire experiencing both socio-economic deprivation and poor provision of accessible greenspace, with a view to these neighbourhoods being prioritised in terms of planning, allocation of funding, and effort for improving quality and quantity of accessible greenspace.

Research at the interface of indigenous and western science in the Amazonian Peatlands

Our researchers, Aoife Bennet and Jesus Aguirre-Gutierrez, along with partners in Peru are empirically applying an intercultural interdisciplinary mapping methodology “Non Oñamboan Joi” for assessing nature recovery potential in the Amazon.

More about the project here