A fully funded NERC GW4+ PhD at the University of Exeter on how wildfire and charcoal change soil carbon in Amazon forests. Closes 7 January 2027.
中国国家留学基金委和英国埃克塞特大学合作奖学金（博士生项目） Prof Ted Feldpausch is recruiting students for the China Scholarship Council and University of Exeter PhD Scholarships. Full-time PhD scholarships are available in collaboration with the China Scholarship Council (CSC), for September 2027/28 entry. Available PhD Projects The PhD projects focus on a range of themes related to fire, land-use change, tree mortality, carbon cycling, and forest […]
A new policy brief distils our Global Change Biology study of 36 plots across the Colombian Andes: soil carbon rises six-fold from lowland to high-elevation forest, and a fire-derived fraction nine times the Amazon average makes it exceptionally durable — yet carbon-credit standards still treat soil as optional.
Amazon Soil Carbon: Policy Brief Summary The conversion of forest to agriculture in the Amazon triggers a “deforestation multiplier”: the ecosystem loses carbon equivalent to about 1.2 times the original forest’s aboveground biomass. Current carbon-credit standards such as Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) focus on standing timber, yet new evidence highlights the significant, unprotected carbon […]
The soil in high-elevation, cooler, drier tropical forests in the Colombian Andes stores more carbon from fires than lower, warmer regions, new research shows.
A new study shows the significant impact of recurring fires and agricultural conversion on soil carbon storage in the Amazon rainforest. The research, a collaboration between the University of Exeter (UoE) and Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture (CENA) at the University of São Paulo (USP), demonstrates substantial carbon loss and degradation of soil properties […]
The Amazon rainforest, an important carbon sink, faces increasing threats from deforestation and wildfires. But what happens to the soil carbon after these disturbances? MSc student, Lorena Fleury, in the Tropical Forest Science Postgraduate Programme at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA), supervised by Prof. Ted Feldpausch, has been sampling soil in secondary […]
This opportunity has closed. For current PhD and postdoctoral opportunities in the Feldpausch group, see Opportunities. FAPESP Opportunity Postdoctoral Opportunity to Quantifying Soil Organic Carbon Responses to Landscape-Scale Fire in the Amazon This research aims to map and quantify the environmental factors, especially “fire”, that drive the spatial variation of soil organic carbon (SOC) and […]
This opportunity has closed. For current PhD and postdoctoral opportunities in the Feldpausch group, see Opportunities. We are recruiting for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to model soil carbon and fire in tropical forests. Summary of the Role We wish to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate to support the work of Profs Richard Betts, Ted Feldpausch, […]
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 […]
As part of the NERC-funded Amazon Past Fire project, we coordinated a training session with university students in the secondary education teaching programme at the Federal Universidade de Acre, Brazil, about fire impacts, management, and sustainable forest use in Brazil.
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.
Researchers at the University of Exeter describe some of the globally important research that they lead on tropical forests and peatlands.
The four-day workshop “Science and Practices of Fire in Amazonia: past, present and future”, organized by the University of Exeter, with Brazilian institutions (Cemaden, INPE and UNEMAT), was held between 8 and 11 November – online. The workshop was attended by almost 300 people*, most of them Brazilian and about 15% of foreigners (Europe, Africa, […]
A new study by Pontes-Lopes et al. 2021 examining the impacts of the record-breaking drought and fires caused by the 2015/2016 El Niño has found that even the wet forests of central Amazonia, forests considered relatively fire-resistant, were affected by fire.
This opportunity has closed. For current PhD and postdoctoral opportunities in the Feldpausch group, see Opportunities. The public selection process is now open for assessing and selecting candidates for admission to the Masters and PhD programme in the Tropical Forests Science Programme at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) with research projects matching themes […]
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 Research opportunities. Two complementary PhD studentships have been funded thanks to donations from long-term University of Exeter supporters, the A. G. Leventis Foundation. Both will be based within the Global Systems Institute and focus on tropical forest protection and restoration, […]
A huge new study has unravelled what factors control tree mortality rates in Amazon forests and helps to explain why tree mortality is increasing across the Amazon basin. The capacity of the Amazon forest to store carbon in a changing climate will ultimately be determined by how fast trees die. The new analysis found that the […]
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 […]
Tropical forests face an uncertain future under climate change, but new research published in Science suggests they can continue to store large amounts of carbon in a warmer world if countries limit greenhouse gas emissions.
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.
The ability of the world’s tropical forests to remove carbon from the atmosphere is decreasing, according to a study tracking 300,000 trees over 30 years, published today in Nature.
There has been a large increase in deforestation and wildfire in Amazonia over recent years. Fire in tropical forests increases tree mortality, degrades forest structure, and reduces carbon stocks (Figure 1). Remote sensing now permits a rapid and accurate assessment of the location and extent of fires. On the ground and in forests, however, there […]
New research in Geography at the University of Exeter is developing a charcoal reflectance methodology into a novel metric with which to assess fire severity and the amount of energy that has been delivered across burned areas in the UK, USA and Brazilian Amazon.
Fire is an important disturbance factor on the land surface, and effects carbon, nitrogen and water cycles, and it is therefore important to be able to represent this process in models.
This opportunity has closed. This studentship was re-advertised in 2020: see the 2020 advert. For current opportunities in the Feldpausch group, see Opportunities.
Our recent research highlights the negative effects of fire on the forest carbon sink in seasonally flooded forests in southern Amazonia, an area rich in diversity at the forest-savanna transition, including permanent forest plots from the Parque Estadual Araguaia.
Previous research (Feldpausch et al. 2007) by my group showed the variation in rates of carbon uptake by regrowing secondary forests. Our new research published this month refines IPCC default rates used to estimate aboveground net biomass change for tropical and subtropical forest. The results will improve estimates of forest carbon uptake for greenhouse gas accounting.
A recent drought completely shut down the Amazon Basin’s carbon sink, by killing trees and slowing their growth, a ground-breaking study led by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds has found.
For the first time, an international research team, including Dr Ted Feldpausch, a tropical forest ecologist from the University of Exeter, has provided direct evidence of the rate at which individual trees in the Amazon Basin ‘inhale’ carbon from the atmosphere during a severe drought.