## 1 Introduction  
African tropical forests experience increasing pressure under the influence of land use and climate change, resulting in substantial area reduction and degradation. Consequently, the sustainability of tropical forest ecosystems and the wide range of services they provide to human society are at risk. Land use change is mainly triggered by a seemingly inexorable population growth, generating a continuously growing demand for food and space [1; 2]. Urban expansion affects vast areas beyond city boundaries by import of agricultural and forest products [3], while the still dominant system of production, slash-and-burn agriculture, is no longer sustainable because the fallow period between different phases is greatly reduced or even skipped. Other direct human threats to these ecosystems include the expansion of pastures [4] and roads [5], illegal or poorly managed logging [6] and the rapid expansion of biofuel production [7]. These dynamics reduce biodiversity and expose urban surroundings to savannization or even soil erosion [8; 9]. In central and West Africa, the forest has been reduced by 4% from 2000 to 2010 and by 2% more from 2010 to 2015 [10]. The remaining forest is characterized by increasing fragmentation and by use of protected area resources [11; 12; 13]. The reduction of forest cover at landscape level may also alter tree species composition and functionality [14], for instance, by the replacement of highly specialized taxa by more common local species taking advantage of the proliferation of fire-degraded, drier or more illuminated areas as observed in the Neotropics [15; 16]. Although such degradations of forest cores are much subtler than the deforestation and degradation observed around cities, they will also considerably alter ecosystem services (ES) in the future. Yet, increasing evidence from Africa indicates changes in distribution and phenology of species and ecosystem perturbations exceeding those induced by direct human pressures [17]. This evidence points to effects of climate change on vegetation, putting at risk of extinction those species unable to respond adequately [18; 19]. Although it is difficult to determine the role of climate change in isolation from the other drivers because of important interacting effects [20], the impact of future climate change on ecosystems and individual species should be investigated to assess resilience. If resilience is affected by climate change, vulnerability to anthropogenic pressures may increase. Furthermore, by deepening our understanding of how climate change might alter landscapes, we can improve our efforts to mitigate those effects [21]. Following the call for more studies on the response of African ecosystems to future climate change [22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27], the number of studies is now rapidly growing. They confirmed the risk of increasing ecosystem vulnerability in, for instance, Congo Basin region [28], South Africa [21; 29], West Africa [30] and intertropical Africa [31]. Other studies warn of an increasing species vulnerability in, for instance, Namibia [32], East Africa [33], West Africa [34], Cape region [35], eastern Morocco [36], Algeria [37] and Tunisia [38] when they experience increased water and temperature stress. Nonetheless, these studies, when the analysis is led at the species level, are for the most part performed with environmental niche-based models (ENMs). These models have widely acknowledged limitations (e.g., [39]) that are mostly derived from the hypothesis of uniformitarianism. Indeed, since ENMs rely on empirical relationships between environmental variables and observed species occurrence or abundance to predict future situations, they are unable to take some crucial factors into account. For instance, these models neglect ecosystem response times under the transient climatic evolution, they are ineffective to take CO\({}_{2}\) fertilization and its potential impacts on the carbon and water budgets into account, and they describe the biotic interactions only implicitly.