Résumé
Tropical forests contribute to approximately 70% of the world's forest carbon sink and support more than half the known species on Earth. Despite their global significance, our empirical understanding of the structure and functioning of tropical forests remains hindered due to the limited availability of field-based observations across environmental, disturbance, and successional gradients. While several international research networks have made significant contributions to tropical forest science over the past decades, none of them offer a comprehensive pantropical perspective on the dynamics of these critical ecosystems. Here, we introduce the Alliance for Tropical Forest Science (ATFS), a new pantropical partnership that aims to accelerate research and build the scientific capacity necessary to improve understanding of how tropical forests function and to predict their responses to future environmental changes. The ATFS brings together 12 international tropical forest plot networks that manage 11,680 forest plots across 57 countries. We present the main objectives of the alliance and share the experience from the Tropical Forest Mortality Working Group (ATFS–MWG). We discuss the main challenges and showcase recent advancements in multi-network data harmonization and capacity building, along with preliminary results from the first multi-network study aiming to identify the primary drivers of tree mortality and associated carbon losses across the world's tropical forests. As climate changes, assembling the disciplinary expertise, data, and scientific capacity across tropical forests is critical to resolving the underlying drivers of forest dynamics as well as informing the policy initiatives necessary to stop further global temperature increases and biodiversity losses.