African rainforests climatically 'more resilient'

African rainforests may be more resilient to climatic changes compared to Amazon and other regions, say scientists.

The surviving forests have endured many-a-climatic catastrophes over the  past 4000 years, and are therefore better suited to cope with any future climatic changes, the international gathering of scientists says.

The main reason behind the resilience is Africa's far more varying climatic conditions compared to other forests of the world.

Despite the fact that these forests are much lower in biodiversity, "the species that remain are relatively adaptable, have broad ranges and have adapted to quite rapid changes in rainfall. So, overall, the remaining system - although it may be poorer to some extent - may be much more resilient to the pressures from climate change in this century," conference organiser Yadvinder Malhi, professor of ecosystems at the University of Oxford, told BBC News.

 The BBC reports:

"The three-day conference - entitled Climate Change, Deforestation and the Future of African Rainforests - focused on the tropical forests of West Africa, which helped highlight a key issue.

"One thing that really came out was how little we know about African climate compared to other regions of the world," Prof Malhi observed.

"There are large gaps [in the data]. If you look at a map of where weather stations are reporting, there is no data coming out of almost the entire Congo Basin."

It was an issue that was also highlighted by one of the speakers, Mark New from the University of Cape Town.

"A colleague of mine put it very nicely when he said that if you took a scale of what is known in various regions, and if you went into West Africa and the Sahel region, which has been extensively studied, and made that 100, if you then went down to the West African coast where the tropical forests are, it would probably be about 50 in terms of relative knowledge," he explained.

"But then if you carried on down to the Congo Basin, then you would probably get five or 10 out of 100."

Prof New added: "One of the critical points that I made is that what we know and understand about what controls the climate and variability, in the Congo especially, is basically zero.

"This makes it very difficult to make any strong predictions of what the future might be."

As well as issues surrounding climate data, the conference also heard about research projects assessing characteristics of the region's tropical forests.

Simon Lewis from the University of Leeds, UK, outlined findings regarding long-term forest plots.

"One of the big findings has been that African forests have more biomass, and have much bigger trees, in comparison with the forests in the Amazon," he told BBC News.

"That is partly because the trees are longer lived so they are becoming bigger over time, and partly because the whole forests are more productive.

"But we are not entirely sure why the African forests are more productive than those in the Amazon.""