Department Seminar: Robinson Negron-Juarez

Title: Pan-Tropical Convective Storms as a Driver of Forest Dynamics

Abstract: Tropical forest dynamics are shaped by multiple interacting processes, yet the contribution of convective storms as a large-scale disturbance mechanism has remained unevenly quantified across the tropics and largely absent from ecosystem models. In this talk, I present a pan-tropical assessment of wind-driven forest disturbance patterns using ground-based and satellite observations across Amazonia, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia. Multispectral imagery shows that intense convective storms generate widespread windthrow (the uprooting and breakage of trees by strong downdrafts) producing coherent, directional disturbance patterns that are consistently detectable from space and aligned with organized convection. These events occur across all major tropical forest regions, contribute to forest turnover, and are followed by rapid post-disturbance regrowth, establishing storm-driven disturbance as a common component of tropical forest dynamics rather than a regional anomaly. Building on these observational constraints, I also introduce ongoing efforts to incorporate windthrow into vegetation models by linking high-resolution atmospheric forcing with mechanistic representations of tree failure and recovery in the ELM-FATES framework. Together, this work connects atmospheric processes, satellite-observed forest disturbance, and emerging model representations, providing a foundation for integrating convective storm impacts into predictions of tropical forest dynamics in Earth system models.