Several areas in the Tropical region - including the Amazon, central America, central and western Africa, and Indonesia - have been identified as climate change hotspots under different warming scenarios in the 21st century. These vast areas harbor a mosaic of vegetation types, ranging from rainforests to seasonally dry tropical forests to agriculture and pasturelands, at multiple spatial scales. Forested areas, rich in biodiversity and high in carbon stocks, have been subject to rapid transformation driven by increasing anthropogenic pressures, climate change, and land use change. Agricultural and agropastoral systems are also under threat posed by changes in the climate system. Atmosphere-land surface interactions, vegetation resilience thresholds, and ecosystem services are being reshaped by rising temperatures, shifting precipitation, and more frequent extreme events related to climate change. At the same time, land cover changes - deforestation, degradation, fires, conversion and restoration - have the potential to amplify the impact of these disturbances on these diverse tropical biogeophysical systems.
We thus invite contributions that explore how land use and land cover change (LULCC), under current warming and climate change, are impacting tropical ecosystem functioning. Emphasis is on impacts to water, carbon, and energy stocks and fluxes. We welcome research using remote sensing (e.g., MODIS, ECOSTRESS, SMAP, GEDI, Sentinel, SWOT, BIOMASS), in situ data (e.g., flux towers, plant traits), and modeling approaches.