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.
Lorena de Souza Fleury’s MSc at INPA finds that forest age, not fertiliser, drove carbon recovery in Amazonian secondary forests after 25 years, with soil holding most of the carbon.
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Prof Ted Feldpausch and Prof Jose Iriarte developed a new display with the Eden Project to communicate to the public research findings about historical land-use and fire use by pre-Columbian people.
This opportunity has closed. For current PhD and postdoctoral opportunities in the Feldpausch group, see Opportunities. There is a post-doctoral opportunity at INPE to study forest degradation, fire, and soil carbon using remote sensing.
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.
Fire is an important cause of disturbance in terrestrial ecosystems and can has a major impact on biodiversity. We evaluated the effect of fire regime on species richness and tree basal area in southern Amazon forest using Landsat and PALSAR data.
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 […]
Innovation by ancient farmers to improve soil fertility continue to have an impact on the biodiversity of the Amazon, a major new study shows.
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.
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.