Biology

David Galbraith and Manuel Gloor
University of Leeds, UK

Amazonia hosts the largest tropical humid forests and are one of the major air upwelling regions in the tropics. The forests are exposed to rapidly increasing temperatures and increasingly variable climate, as well as strong human pressure. We will present recent results from long-term forest plot networks and remote sensing about ongoing changes. The former suggest that these forests have been sinks over the past decades but that tree mortality is steadily increasing and forests now approximately in carbon balance. The reason for the increase in mortality is unclear. Deforestation rates from the Brazilian government based on comparably coarse resolution remote sensing data show a decreasing trend for the Brazilian Amazon.   We will show that inclusion of higher resolution remote sensing data shifts this picture to a less optimistic outlook. We will finally discuss an approach at the fringes of the Amazon forests to record and understand the effect of rapidly warming temperatures which we also plan to pursue at an Indian forest site.