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...
In 2006 Brazil passed legislation allowing concessions for industrial timber harvest in public forests. This decision was part of a broader effort to control deforestation, which had spiked to its second highest level, of about 25,000 km2, in 2004. Specifically,...
The Amazon Region contains both the largest block of contiguous tropical forests and the largest river basin in the world. The Amazon Forest Biome spans an area of 6.5 million km 2 and includes Amazonian forests and the contiguous forests of the Guiana Shield and...
Deforestation reduced forest cover in Brazil’s Xingu River Basin (XB; area: 510,000 km2) from 90% of the basin in the 1970s to 75% in the 2000s. Such large-scale land cover changes can substantially alter regional water budgets, but their influence can be difficult...
Understanding tropical forest diversity is a long-standing challenge in ecology. With global change, it has become increasingly important to understand how anthropogenic and natural factors interact to determine diversity. Anthropogenic increases in fire frequency...
Understanding the relationship between photosynthesis, net primary productivity and growth in forest ecosystems is key to understanding how these ecosystems will respond to global anthropogenic change, yet the linkages among these components are rarely explored in...
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture together with forestry (including land-use changes (LUC)) are responsible for nearly 30% of global anthropogenic emissions (IPCC, 2007), but the mitigation potential of these sectors is significant.