Moist tropical forests in Amazonia and elsewhere are subjected to increasingly severe drought episodes through the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and possibly through deforestation-driven reductions in rainfall. The effects of this trend on tropical forest canopy dynamics, emissions of greenhouse gases, and other ecological functions are potentially large but poorly understood. We established a throughfall exclusion experiment in an east-central Amazon forest (Tapajo´s National Forest, Brazil) to help understand these effects.
Multiple pathways of commodity crop expansion in tropical forest landscapes
Multiple pathways of commodity crop expansion in tropical forest landscapes
Commodity crop expansion, for both global and domestic urban markets, follows multiple land change pathways entailing direct and indirect deforestation, and results in various social and environmental impacts. Here we compare six published case studies of rapid...