Amazon Forest to Field

Every year, the Amazon frontier loses forest to farmland — but while the trees disappear from satellite images, a hidden transformation unfolds in the soil beneath.

The Amazon Forest to Field project investigates the mechanistic controls of soil organic carbon (SOC) persistence after deforestation, tracing how fire, clay mineralogy, land-use management, and climate determine whether centuries of stored carbon stays locked underground or returns to the atmosphere as CO₂. By combining continent-scale field sampling across the Arc of Deforestation with process-based modelling, we identify the pathways toward carbon-negative agriculture in the Brazilian Amazon.

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