Tropical forests are critical to global biodiversity, climate regulation, and ecosystem services, yet climate change leaves them increasingly vulnerable to multiple stressors. Among the most significant include high temperatures and drought (atmospheric and soil), which can have far-reaching effects on forest structure, species composition, and ecosystem functioning. These stressors interact in complex ways, creating trade-offs in water use strategies where plants must balance the risk of hydraulic failure with the need to alleviate heat stress and maintain carbon uptake. Given that these stressors often covary – temperature increases accompanying both atmospheric and soil drought – it becomes difficult to predict how tropical forests will respond to future climate scenarios.



The symposium will examine the physiological and ecological consequences of combined temperature and drought stress, including impacts on survival and growth, forest dynamics, and ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and water cycling. We encourage presentations from studies across a range of scales, from the leaf level to the whole tree, forest, and ecosystem level. Studies may include those that aim to disentangle the response of one variable (i.e. temperature) from another, or the trade-offs when exposed to combined stressors.