A new study reveals an unprecedented increase in wildfires in tropical peatlands during the 20th century. Peatlands store vast quantities of carbon below the Earth’s surface – more than all the world’s forest biomass combined – but when they catch fire large amounts of the stored carbon is released into the atmosphere. Wildfires in tropical regions have been on the rise in recent decades, but the history and characteristics of wildfires in tropical peatlands remain largely unknown. […]
A two-day hybrid workshop (both online and in-person) was held on 25th and 26th November 2021 that included 20 participants from different institutions in the United Kingdom, Australia, Colombia, Spain, and Brazil.
This video and paper highlight the work we are doing through ForestPlots.net to take the pulse of Earth’s tropical forests. Research and activities through Forestplots.net for the past decade and a half have created opportunities to advance understanding of tropical forests and trained the next generation of tropical forest scientists.
In our recent work studying the impact of record heat and drought on intact African tropical rainforests there was surprising resilience to the extreme conditions during the last major 2015/2016 El Niño event. The international study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that intact rainforests across tropical Africa continued to remove […]
This opportunity has closed. For current PhD and postdoctoral opportunities in the Feldpausch group, see Opportunities. We are seeking qualified and motivated candidates to pursue a PhD studying how lighting affects tree mortality, carbon dynamics, and forest composition in tropical forests. Applications for the NERC GW4+ project are open, with a closing date of 16:00 […]
A major study in forests across the tropics is the first global assessment of palm tree numbers to better understand forest composition, diversity, and to reduce uncertainty about the role of palms in the carbon balance in these ecosystems.
Competition among trees is an important driver of community structure and dynamics in tropical forests. Neighboring trees may impact an individual tree’s growth rate and probability of mortality, but large-scale geographic and environmental variation in these competitive effects has yet to be evaluated across the tropical forest biome.