Thank you to all organisers, speakers, and delegates who helped to make the 23rd NPS a great success. We must thank the South China Botanical Garden and the Guangzhou Association for Science and Technology for the help co-organising the meeting. We will continue to update the site with related information.

Assistant Editor, New Phytologist

View the gallery of photos from the meeting

Read the meeting report by Doug Schaefer and Matthew Warren

The diverse assemblage of ecosystems in tropical regions of the Earth holds a large fraction of the terrestrial biosphere’s carbon stock, and the annual exchange between tropical ecosystems (plants and soils) and the atmosphere is a critical controller of the CO₂ concentration of the atmosphere and hence of climate. Large-scale changes in the structure and function of tropical ecosystems, whether from the pressures of development or the impacts of drought, can alter the balance in the annual exchange of carbon with far reaching implications for the pace of climate change. Global models that couple the Earth’s climate system to the carbon cycle must, therefore, characterize well the biogeochemical and ecophysiological processes of tropical ecosystems and their sensitivity to atmospheric and climatic change. In this symposium we will define the issues of carbon cycling in tropical environments at global and regional scales. We will then consider the evidence from research in plant physiology and plant-soil interactions and how that research can inform larger-scale analyses. We will consider all tropical regions, but our presence in South China puts a special emphasis on the tropical ecosystems of China, how they are changing, and the emerging research from the region.