Dear colleagues,
We would like to encourage your submissions to our session entitled "*Climatic controls on vegetation dynamics in tropical forests*" *(B025; session ID# 8513) *at this year's Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco (December 14-18, 2015). Tropical forests (Amazon, Insular SE Asia, and African Congo) provide critical ecosystem services and play a key role in storing terrestrial carbon stock and harboring biodiversity. However, the key questions as to how structure and function of tropical forests are controlled by climate remain largely to be explored, leaving the predictions of tropical forests under climate change highly uncertain. *Our session broadly draws recent studies and advances from ground-based observations, near-surface and satellite remote sensing, and earth system modeling to explore the underling climatic controls on tropical vegetation dynamics, ranging from various temporal scales (hourly, daily, seasonal, inter-annual and decadal scales). We especially welcome contributions that integrate observation and modeling work together to improve the predictive ability. Our session also aims to identify some future key research directions to further the understanding of global tropical forests response to climate change.* We have invited the following four speakers for our session to provide a broad coverage of studies in our area: *Dr. Paul Moorcroft (Harvard University)* *Dr. Chris Doughty (Oxford University)* *Dr. Alfredo Huete (University of Technology Sydney)* *Dr. David Schimel (NASA JPL)* You can find more details of our session URL: https://agu.confex.com/ag u/fm15/preliminaryview.cgi/Session8513. Please note that the submission deadline to the AGU abstract is *Wednesday, August 5**. * We sincerely look forward to your submission and participation of our session! Regards, Jin Wu and Scott Saleska (University of Arizona) Xi Yang (Brown University) and Kaiyu Guan (Stanford University)
