Data and code associated with: Storms are an important driver of change in tropical forests

Tropical forest dynamics and composition have changed over recent decades, but the proximate drivers of these changes remain unclear. Investigations into these trends have focused on increasing drought stress, CO2, temperature, and fires, whereas convective storms are generally overlooked. We argue that existing literature provides clear support for the importance of storms as drivers of forest change. We reanalyze the largest plot-based study of tropical forest carbon dynamics to show that lightning frequency – an indicator of storm activity – strongly predicts forest carbon storage and residence time, and its inclusion improves model fit and weakens evidence for effects of high temperatures. Convective storm activity has increased 5-25% per decade over the past half century. Extrapolating from historic trends, we estimate that storms likely contribute ca. 50% of the reported increases in biomass mortality across Amazonia, with all realistic combinations of assumptions indicating a possible range of 12-118%. Spatial variation in storm activity shows weak relationships with drought, demonstrating that forests can experience high drought stress, high storm activity, or both. Accordingly, we hypothesize that convective storms are amongst the most important drivers tropical forest change, and as such, they require significant research investment to avoid misguiding science, policy, and management. File and folder list , includes: amazon.zip: This folder contains all of the data for producing maps of storm activity and drought stress across the Amazon region and adjacent forests. This includes 4 folders and 3 files (1 csv and 2 tif). The code to run these analyses is in folder "Code_for_Amazon_analyses" along with the metadata for these files. climVars: .Rdata files for each month-year combination from 1971-2019. This is an output from scripts/parseClimData.R, which parses the netcdf files and isolates the target variables of CAPE (cape thresholds) and VPD figures: figures for this publication, Gora et al., 2025 ...