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. […]
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.
Pyrogenic Carbon in the Amazon: quantifying soil carbon responses to the effect of fire. 2021/00976-4 – UKRI – NERC – Research Project – Thematic Plinio Barbosa de Camargo (CENA/USP) – Ted R. Feldpausch Institution: Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture USP Supervisor name: Plínio Camargo / Ted Feldpausch Lab. Isotopic Ecology. USP SCENE Recipient: […]
A fully-funded PhD scholarship is available at the University of Exeter: Soil carbon dynamics following Amazon forest wildfires About the award Supervisors Lead Supervisor Dr Kees Jan Van Groenigen, Department of Geography, University of Exeter Additional Supervisors Professor Ted Feldpausch, Department of Geography, University of Exeter Eleanor Burke, Met Office Professor Plinio Camargo, University of […]
A fully-funded PhD scholarship is available at the University of Exeter: Integrating sensing, modelling and data analytics to understand forest microclimate dynamics under fire, degradation and climate change in Amazonia Supervision Lead Supervisor: Professor Ted Feldpausch Co-Supervisors: Ilya Maclean; I.M.D.Maclean@exeter.ac.uk Project This project combines environmental sensing, computational modelling anddata analytics to understand how climate change, […]
By Oscar Kennedy-Blundell | Postdoctoral Research Associate I am currently working as a postdoctoral research associate focusing on black carbon, or pyrogenic carbon (PyC), in the Amazon Basin. My primary focus is modelling the occurrence of PyC using the RothC model and the JULES land surface model.
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 […]
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 Junior 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 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.
Artwork developed by our Amazon Past Fire and Amazon PyroCarbon Projects, funded by UK NERC and ODA grants, was shown at a new artwork exhibit to highlight deforestation and wildfire. Tipping Point, by Bristol artist Luke Jerram, combined smoke, lights and sound to simulate forest fires. The installation ran at the University of Bristol’s Botanic […]
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.
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 its “pyrogenic” fraction (CPi) in the Amazon. It is based on 2 objectives: O1. Modeling baseline […]
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, and Kees van Groenigen at the University of Exeter and in collaboration Dr Eleanor Burke and Dr […]
Expert talk – ‘The history of people and fire in the Amazon rainforest’ Where: The Core Film Room (1st floor), The Eden Project, Cornwall, UK When: 2pm, 11-Sept-2023 People have been living in the Amazon rainforest for 13,000 years. Their use of fire and plants has had long-term impacts on forest structure, composition, and soils. Join Professor Ted Feldpausch and Professor José […]
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.
A project in partnership between the University of Exeter and UFAC-Brazil held the 2nd Workshop: Exchange of Knowledge and Teaching on Burning in the Amazon, taught by biologist Yara Araújo Pereira de Paula, Master in Ecology from UFAC. The event had students as its target audience and ran from Monday, 20th to Saturday, the 25th, […]
The Municipal Secretary of Education of Confresa offered the event “I Workshop Exchange of Knowledge and Teaching on Burning in the Amazon”, which took place on February 22, 23 and 24, 2023, in the face-to-face format at the municipality of Confresa, MT. Funded by the University of Exeter (UK) and the Natural Environmental Research Council, […]
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.
This project is one of a number that are in competition for funding from the NERC Great Western Four+ Doctoral Training Partnership (GW4+ DTP). The GW4+ DTP consists of the Great Western Four alliance of the University of Bath, University of Bristol, Cardiff University and the University of Exeter plus five Research Organisation partners: British […]
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.
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, […]
The Workshop held by the University of Exeter, National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN), National Institute for Space Research (INPE), and University of Mato Grosso State (UNEMAT) will be held online (synchronous) with offline (asynchronous) content also being produced. The event is free of charge and will take place between […]
Research at the University of Exeter examines how measurements of charcoal reflectance can be used to understand fire regimes and carbon dynamics in tropical forests in South America.
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.
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.
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