State of the art on tropical tree allometry

In the recent decades, a renewed interest has been observed for the estimation and monitoring of forest biomass and carbon worldwide, and specifically in the tropics with the ongoing negotiations under the UNFCCC for the implementation of the REDD+ mechanism. Because all methods to estimate biomass and carbon stocks contained in tropical forests rely on an allometric equation to convert inventory data into biomass estimates, tropical tree allometry recently received great attention from scientists and research sponsors.
Pantropical allometric models early developed in the 1980s, and 2000s, were recently revised and a global consensus is emerging toward a universal approach to estimate biomass and carbon stocks in tropical forest using generic allometric models. Many local allometric models were also recently established, specifically in places previously under-sampled, such as the forests of the Congo basin. We believe that the newly collected data that have and will have strong practical implications for the estimation of forest biomass and carbon stocks are also extremely important to explore the between-site and between-species variations in tropical tree allometry.
Despite major advances in our understanding of tropical tree allometry, an integrative view on tropical tree allometry, its variation and ecological (and evolutionary) significance, is yet to arise. As an introduction to the session, we will present the interest of analyzing between-site and between-species variations in tropical tree allometry, integrating methods and spatial scales, and bridging disciplines and approaches to reach a unifying view.