BioEO
Biodiversity & Earth Observation Lab
1. Interdependence of tropical forests and soil biota as seen by remote sensing
We cannot adequately understand or simulate how tropical forests respond to environmental change without the knowledge of the local feedback between plants and their soil biota (e.g. fungi and bacterial communities) as these play a major role in the resilience of forest ecosystems. Current approaches that model vegetations responses to a changing climate tend to ignore such soil-plant feedbacks simply because we do not know how they are interconnected across forest ecosystems. The biodiversity-rich tropical forests, which are home to more than 50% of global diversity, urgently need answers to these questions as evidence shows how climate change is affecting their biodiversity levels.
Funded by NERC Pushing the frontiers
2. Effects of vegetation structure and landscape simplification on bee diversity
Species interactions underpin the functioning of ecosystems. Further, ensuring the stability of plant-pollinator interactions is critical to pollination service provision. By linking in-situ pollinator sampling and remote sensing technologies, we are generating new insights into drivers of pollinator communities and interaction networks across the tropics, ultimately aiming to improve monitoring of biodiversity in areas of nature recovery at scale.
We are actively researching in the Brazilian Cerrado and in tropical forests in Eastern Ghana. In Ghana, we are examining pollinator diversity and plant-pollinator interaction networks across a nature recover in order to evaluate how reforestation and agroforestry affects pollinator communities and how remote sensing can improve monitoring capacity in these landscapes. In the Brazilian Cerrado, we are combining mobile LiDAR, high-resolution satellite imagery, and in-situ data on pollination networks to understand how vegetation structure drives pollination network structure in tropical woodland savannas. In characterising pollinator diversity and plant-pollinator interaction networks across various environmental gradients, we aim to better understand their vulnerabilities to global environmental change as well as investigate the applicability of metrics derived from earth observation (EO) to monitor pollinator communities and pollination networks at scale.
Funded by Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery
and NERC
3. AI, Remote Sensing, and Forest Resilience to Climate - Insights for Public Health
Climate change poses a critical threat to tropical forests and to human well-being in biodiverse regions such as the Amazon. This project will investigate how climate-driven stresses (e.g. drought and heat) are reshaping forest functional strategies in the Amazon and how these ecological shifts intersect with public health outcomes and socio-economic vulnerability across municipalities. The project will integrate functional ecology, remote sensing and artificial intelligence, epidemiology, and socio-environmental modelling.
Funded by Leverhulme Trust
4.Tropical Forest Adaptation to a Changing Biosphere
The ADAPTA project (Tropical Forest Adaptation to a Changing Biosphere) is led by Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, will explore the resilience of tropical forests at a pan-tropical scale, advancing our understanding of how these critical ecosystems respond to accelerating environmental change. I am deeply grateful to my family, friends and collaborators around the tropics with whom I have developed all these crazy ideas, and with whom I look forward to developing this project in the years ahead.
Funded by NERC Consolidator Grant
Publication PDFs are available to read & download at the adjacent buttons, for accessibility
Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J., Rifai, S. W., Deng, X., Ter Steege, H., Thomson, E., Corral-Rivas, J. J., ... & Malhi, Y. (2025). Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests. Nature, 1-8. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08663-2
Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J., Díaz, S., Rifai, S. W., Corral-Rivas, J. J., Nava-Miranda, M. G., González-M, R., ... & Malhi, Y. (2025). Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change. Science, 387(6738), eadl5414. doi: 10.1126/science.adl5414
Deng, X., Carvajal, D. E., Urrutia-Jalabert, R., Machida, W. S., Rosen, A., Zhang-Zheng, H., ... & Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J. (2025). Quantifying the functional composition and potential resilience hotspots across a large latitudinal and environmental gradient in South American forests. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 142, 104704. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2025.104704
Jefferys, K. M., Betts, M. G., Robinson, W. D., Curtis, J. R., Hallman, T., Smith, A. C., ... & Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J. (2024). Breeding habitat loss linked to declines in Rufous Hummingbirds. Avian Conservation and Ecology, 19(2), 2. doi: 10.5751/ACE-02681-190202
Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J., Stevens, N., & Berenguer, E. (2023). Valuing the functionality of tropical ecosystems beyond carbon. Trends in ecology & evolution, 38(12), 1109-1111. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2023.08.012
Doughty, C.E., Gaillard, C., Burns, P., Keany, J., Abraham, A., Malhi, Y.S., Aguirre-Gutierrez, J., Koch, G., Jantz, P., Shenkin, A. and Tang, H. (2023). Tropical forests are mainly unstratified especially in Amazonia and regions with lower fertility or higher temperatures. doi:https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-664x/ace723.
Dechant, B., Jens Kattge, Pavlick, R., Schneider, N., Sabatini, F., Álvaro Moreno-Martínez, Butler, E.E., Peter, Vallicrosa, H., Teja Kattenborn, Coline C. F. Boonman, Madani, N., Wright, I.P., Dong, N., Hannes Feilhauer, Josep Peñuelas, Jordi Sardans, Jesús Aguirre‐Gutiérrez, Reich, P.B. and Leitao, P. (2023). Intercomparison of global foliar trait maps reveals fundamental differences and limitations of upscaling approaches. EarthArXiv (California Digital Library). doi:https://doi.org/10.31223/x58s97.
Zhang, H., Malhi, Y., Agne Gvozdevaite, Peprah, T., Boackye, M., Kasia Ziemińska, Adu‐Bredu, S., Jesús Aguirre‐Gutiérrez, Sandoval, D., Prentice, C. and Oliveras, I. (2023). Photosynthetic and water transport strategies of plants along a tropical forest aridity gradient: a test of optimality theory. bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory). doi:https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.10.523419.
Bhalla, I.S., Aguirre‐Gutiérrez, J. and Whittaker, R.J. (2023). Batting for rice: The effect of bat exclusion on rice in North-East India. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 341, p.108196. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2022.108196.
Doughty, C.E., Gaillard, C., Abraham, A., Burns, P., Keany, J., Jesús Aguirre‐Gutiérrez, Malhi, Y., Jantz, P., Koch, G., Shenkin, A. and Tang, H. (2022). Unstratified forests dominate the tropics especially in regions with lower fertility or higher temperatures. EcoEvoRxiv. doi:https://doi.org/10.32942/x2vc7t.
Bauman, D., Fortunel, C., Delhaye, G., Malhi, Y., Cernusak, L.A., Bentley, L.P., Rifai, S.W., Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J., Menor, I.O., Phillips, O.L., McNellis, B.E., Bradford, M., Laurance, S.G.W., Hutchinson, M.F., Dempsey, R., Santos-Andrade, P.E., Ninantay-Rivera, H.R., Chambi Paucar, J.R. and McMahon, S.M. (2022). Tropical tree mortality has increased with rising atmospheric water stress. Nature, [online] pp.1–6. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04737-7.
Aguirre‐Gutiérrez, J., Berenguer, E., Oliveras Menor, I., Bauman, D., Corral-Rivas, J.J., Nava-Miranda, M.G., Both, S., Ndong, J.E., Ondo, F.E., Bengone, N.N., Mihinhou, V., Dalling, J.W., Heineman, K., Figueiredo, A., González-M, R., Norden, N., Hurtado-M, A.B., González, D., Salgado-Negret, B. and Reis, S.M. (2022). Functional susceptibility of tropical forests to climate change. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 6(7), pp.878–889. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01747-6.
Liang, J., Javier, Picard, N., Zhou, M., Pijanowski, B.C., Jacobs, D.F., Reich, P.B., Crowther, T.W., Gert-Jan Nabuurs, de-Miguel, S., Fang, J., Woodall, C.W., Jens-Christian Svenning, Tommaso Jucker, Bastin, J.-F., Wiser, S.K., Ferry Slik, Hérault, B., Alberti, G. and Keppel, G. (2022). Co-limitation towards lower latitudes shapes global forest diversity gradients. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 6(10), pp.1423–1437. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01831-x.
Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J., Rifai, S., Shenkin, A., Oliveras, I., Bentley, L.P., Svátek, M., Girardin, C.A.J., Both, S., Riutta, T., Berenguer, E., Kissling, W.D., Bauman, D., Raab, N., Moore, S., Farfan-Rios, W., Figueiredo, A.E.S., Reis, S.M., Ndong, J.E., Ondo, F.E. and N’ssi Bengone, N. (2021). Pantropical modelling of canopy functional traits using Sentinel-2 remote sensing data. Remote Sensing of Environment, 252, p.112122. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.112122.
Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J., Malhi, Y., Lewis, S.L., Fauset, S., Adu-Bredu, S., Affum-Baffoe, K., Baker, T.R., Gvozdevaite, A., Hubau, W., Moore, S., Peprah, T., Ziemińska, K., Phillips, O.L. and Oliveras, I. (2020). Long-term droughts may drive drier tropical forests towards increased functional, taxonomic and phylogenetic homogeneity. Nature Communications, 11(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16973-4.
Resources & presentations
Tropical forests and a changing climate: Analysis at the interface between trait-based ecology, forest dynamics and remote sensing
Dr. Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez
CSIR-FORIG, Ghana, January 2022
Understanding climate effects on tropical forests through trait-based ecology and remote sensing:
A presentation at CSIR-FORIG.
Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests
Dr. Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez
This interactive platform provides pantropical maps of community-level canopy functional traits derived from field observations and remote sensing, associated with the article “Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests”. The data include spatial predictions of key leaf traits, wood density and community weighted mean (CWM) trait values across tropical forests worldwide, enabling exploration of large-scale ecological patterns.