This project will reinforce the CongoFORCE FED-tWIN research profile (FED-tWIN2019-prf-075). Tropical forests have been in peril over the last decades due to severe dieback of trees, e.g. due to changing environmental conditions. Most insights in the responses of vegetation to climate depend on short-term records (annual or decadal-scale), yet short-term sensitivities do not necessarily translate into long-term responses (centennial or millennial-scale). As such, a long-term perspective of linkages between climate and vegetation dynamics  is imperative to accurately predict the 21^st century fate of Earth’s rainforests. Therefore the general ambition of this project is to improve our understanding of long-term tropical forest sensitivity and resilience to climate change, by comparing multi-timescale records of the best possible natural archives of forest dynamics: wood and fossil charcoal. This project focuses on the Congo Basin, which represents the World’s second-largest contiguous area of rainforest and plays a major role in global biogeochemical and climate cycles, while it has been largely underrepresented in long-term studies due to a lack of ground-based data.