Soil erosion as a resilience drain in disturbed tropical forests

Tropical forests are threatened by intensifying natural and anthropogenic disturbance regimes. Disturbances reduce tree cover and leave the organic topsoil vulnerable to erosion processes, but when resources are still abundant forests usually recover. Across the tropics, variation in rainfall erosivity – a measure of potential soil exposure to water erosion – indicates that soils in the wetter regions would experience high erosion rates if they...