Climate benefits of Amazon secondary forests—recent advances and research needs
A quarter of the deforested Amazon has regrown as secondary tropical forest and yet the climatic importance of these complex regenerating landscapes is only beginning to be recognised. Advances in satellite remote-sensing have transformed our ability to detect and...
Activity patterns and diet of the howler monkey Alouatta belzebul in areas of logged and unlogged forest in Eastern Amazonia
This work compared the activity patterns and diet of a group of Alouatta belzebul in areas of logged and unlogged forest in eastern Amazonia.
Classifying successional forests using Landsat spectral properties and ecological characteristics in eastern Amazônia
Secondary forests may become increasingly important as temporary reservoirs of genetic diversity, stocks of carbon and nutrients, and moderators of hydrologic cycles in the Amazon Basin as agricultural lands are abandoned and often later cleared again for...
Contribution of transpiration to forest ambient vapour based on isotopic measurements
Using a simple isotope mixing model, we evaluated the relative proportion of water vapour generated by plant transpiration and by soil evaporation at two sites in the Amazon basin. Sampling was carried out at two different soil covers (forest and pasture), in a...
Leaf-cutting ant (Atta sexdens) and nutrient cycling: deep soil inorganic nitrogen stocks, mineralization, and nitrification in Eastern Amazonia
Nest excavation and agricultural activities of the leaf-cutting ant Atta sexdens create complex belowground heterogeneity in secondary forests of Eastern Amazonia. We examined the effects of this heterogeneity on inorganic-N stocks, net mineralization, and net...
Primates in a forest fragment in Eastern Amazon
Many new towns were established along the Belém-Brasília Highway following its construction in the 1960s. One was Paragominas, in the northeastern region of the state of Pará (Fig. 1). Large areas of forest in this region were cut for cattle pasture during...
Some doubts about concessions in Brazil – Should Brazil shelve its proposed system of forest concessions?
The government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil inherited, in its National Forest Program, a formidable proposal to increase the area designated to national forests (Flonas) in the Amazon from eight to 50 million hectares by the year 2010. This objective is...