Category: Amazon Forest
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Tropical forests in the Americas are changing too slowly to track climate change
Our new study published in the journal Science reveals a concerning trend, that tropical forests across the Americas are changing their composition and function too slowly to keep up with the pace of climate change. This mismatch puts these important ecosystems, biodiversity hotspots, and carbon sinks at significant risk.
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Fire reduces tree diversity and carbon in seasonal forests of the southern Amazon
We recently published a paper led by PhD student Maurivan Barros Pereira (State University of Mato Grosso (UNEMAT)), supervised by Prof. Ted Feldpausch and co-supervised by Drs Ben Hur Marimon and Fernando Elias da Silva. The findings were published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, “Post-fire changes in tree diversity, composition and carbon in…
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Extreme El Niño weather saw South America’s forest carbon sink switch off
Tropical forests in South America lose their ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere when conditions become exceptionally hot and dry, according to new research. For a long time, tropical forests have acted as a carbon sink, taking more carbon out of the air than they release into it, a process that has moderated the impact…
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Drought will reduce the rainforest’s ability to remove carbon from the environment
In a major collaboration involving 80 scientists from Europe and South America, our research identified the regions of the Amazon rainforest where trees are most likely to face the greatest risk from drier conditions brought about by climate change. Based on the analysis, our research predicts trees in the western and southern Amazon face the…
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Ancient fires enhance Amazon forest drought resistance
In our recent paper, “Ancient fires enhance Amazon forest drought resistance” published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, we studied if ancient fires can alter the response of Amazonian forests to drought events.
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Tropical Forest Research in Geography at the University of Exeter (video)
Researchers at the University of Exeter describe some of the globally important research that they lead on tropical forests and peatlands.
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Amazon forest fire: rare for millennia, absent for 800 years
A new policy brief shows that intact Amazon forests have not burned for about 800 years, and that the carbon those ancient fires left is still in their soils: any fire in old-growth forest is a break with that history.
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Even Amazon forests with no record of fire carry its legacy deep in their soils
Charcoal-derived carbon makes up a tenth of the soil carbon under Amazon forests with no known fire history, and half of it lies deeper than most soil surveys ever sample.