Africa is forecasted to experience large and rapid climate change¹ and population growth² during the twenty-first century, which threatens the world’s second largest rainforest. Protecting and sustainably managing these African forests requires an increased understanding of their compositional heterogeneity, the environmental drivers of forest composition and their vulnerability to ongoing changes. Here, using a very large dataset of 6 million trees in more than 180,000 field plots, we jointly model the distribution in abundance of the most dominant tree taxa in central Africa, and produce continuous maps of the floristic and functional composition of central African forests. Our results show that the uncertainty in taxon-specific distributions averages out at the community level, and reveal highly deterministic assemblages. We uncover contrasting floristic and functional compositions across climates, soil types and anthropogenic gradients, with functional convergence among types of forest that are floristically dissimilar. Combining these spatial predictions with scenarios of climatic and anthropogenic global change suggests a high vulnerability of the northern and southern forest margins, the Atlantic forests and most forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where both climate and anthropogenic threats are expected to increase sharply by 2085. These results constitute key quantitative benchmarks for scientists and policymakers to shape transnational conservation and management strategies that aim to provide a sustainable future for central African forests.

预计非洲将经历巨大而迅速的气候变化¹和人口增长²在二十一世纪，它威胁着世界第二大热带雨林。保护和可持续管理这些非洲森林需要更多地了解它们的成分异质性、森林成分的环境驱动因素以及它们对持续变化的脆弱性。在这里，我们使用超过 180,000 个田地中的 600 万棵树的非常大的数据集，共同模拟中非最主要的树木类群的丰度分布，并生成中非森林植物区系和功能组成的连续地图。我们的结果表明，特定分类群分布的不确定性在社区水平上平均化，并揭示了高度确定性的组合。我们发现了不同气候的对比植物区系和功能组成，土壤类型和人为梯度，在植物区系不同的森林类型之间具有功能趋同。将这些空间预测与气候和人为全球变化的情景相结合，表明刚果民主共和国北部和南部森林边缘、大西洋森林和大多数森林的高度脆弱性，预计气候和人为威胁将急剧增加2085. 这些结果构成了科学家和决策者制定旨在为中非森林提供可持续未来的跨国保护和管理战略的关键定量基准。