After thousands of kilometres of fieldwork across the Amazon, around two thousand soil samples have passed through the CENA laboratory in Piracicaba. This is the story of how they are dried, ground, sieved, weighed, and analysed to reveal how wildfires affect Amazonian soils.
The Amazon PyroCarbon project has covered thousands of kilometres across Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Amazonas, Acre, and Pará over the past three years. This is the story of the road trips, the Guerreira, and the soil that comes home with the team.
Amazonian rainforests play an important global role in maintaining biodiversity, regulating climate, generating rainfall, and storing carbon. Yet, despite their importance, these forests continue to face multiple forms of degradation.
PhD student Gavyn Mewett has returned from a month of fieldwork in Ghana, where he surveyed lightning-struck trees across Bobiri Forest Reserve and Ankasa Game Reserve as part of the Africa Lightning Project (PI: Prof. Tim Hill; co-I: Prof. Ted Feldpausch, University of Exeter).
In November–December 2024, a seven-member Amazon PyroCarbon Project team established 22 soil plots across contrasting fire histories in the Manaus region, central Amazonia, advancing understanding of fire impacts on soil carbon dynamics.
Between 19 and 30 April 2024, the Amazon PyroCarbon Project team travelled to Acre, Brazil, to revisit permanent burned-forest plots, collect soils and charcoal for ancient fire dating, and install soil respiration monitoring equipment across nine forest plots, three pastures, and two agroforestry systems.
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