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...
Brazil has two major opportunities to end the clearing of its Amazon forest and to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions substantially. The first is its formal announcement within United Nations climate treaty negotiations in 2008 of an Amazon deforestation...
Litter decomposition is a fundamental process for nutrient cycling but we have a limited understanding of this process in disturbed tropical forests. We studied litter decomposition over a 10-mo period in a seasonally dry Amazon forest in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The...
Analysis of possible REDD program interventions in a large-scale Amazon landscape indicates that even modest flows of forest carbon funding can provide substantial cobenefits for aquatic ecosystems, but that the functional integrity of the landscape’s myriad small watersheds would be best protected under a more even spatial distribution of forests. Because of its focus on an ecosystem service with global benefits, REDD could access a large pool of global stakeholders willing to pay to maintain carbon in forests, thereby providing a potential cascade of ecosystem services to local stakeholders who would otherwise be unable to afford them.
Positive aboveground biomass trends have been reported from old‐growth forests across the Amazon basin and hypothesized to reflect a large‐scale response to exterior forcing. The result could, however, be an artefact due to a sampling bias induced by the nature of...
Positive aboveground biomass trends have been reported from old-growth forests across the Amazon basin and hypothesized to reflect a large-scale response to exterior forcing. The result could, however, be an artefact due to a sampling bias induced by the nature of...
The major sources of fire regime alteration worldwide include climate change, agriculture and ranching, deforestation, rural and urban development, energy production, fire exclusion and suppression, invasive species, plantations, and arson. Integrated fire management (IFM) is an approach that considers both damaging and beneficial fires within the context of the natural environments and socio-economic systems in which they occur. IFM takes into account fire ecology, socio-economic issues, and fire management technology to generate practical solutions to fire-related threats to biodiversity.