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de Meira Junior, MS, Pinto, JRR, Ramos, NO et al. (3 more authors) (2020) The impact of long dry periods on the aboveground biomass in a tropical forest: 20 years of monitoring. Carbon Balance and Management, 15 (1). 12. ISSN 1750-0680
Abstract
Background
Long-term studies of community and population dynamics indicate that abrupt disturbances often catalyse changes in vegetation and carbon stocks. These disturbances include the opening of clearings, rainfall seasonality, and drought, as well as fire and direct human disturbance. Such events may be super-imposed on longer-term trends in disturbance, such as those associated with climate change (heating, drying), as well as resources. Intact neotropical forests have recently experienced increased drought frequency and fire occurrence, on top of pervasive increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, but we lack long-term records of responses to such changes especially in the critical transitional areas at the interface of forest and savanna biomes. Here, we present results from 20 years monitoring a valley forest (moist tropical forest outlier) in central Brazil. The forest has experienced multiple drought events and includes plots which have and which have not experienced fire. We focus on how forest structure (stem density and aboveground biomass carbon) and dynamics (stem and biomass mortality and recruitment) have responded to these disturbance regimes.
Results
Overall, the biomass carbon stock increased due to the growth of the trees already present in the forest, without any increase in the overall number of tree stems. Over time, both recruitment and especially mortality of trees tended to increase, and periods of prolonged drought in particular resulted in increased mortality rates of larger trees. This increased mortality was in turn responsible for a decline in aboveground carbon toward the end of the monitoring period.
Conclusion
Prolonged droughts influence the mortality of large trees, leading to a decline in aboveground carbon stocks. Here, and in other neotropical forests, recent droughts are capable of shutting down and reversing biomass carbon sinks. These new results add to evidence that anthropogenic climate changes are already adversely impacting tropical forests.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020, corrected publication 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
Keywords: | Long period drought; Carbon sink; Forest dynamics; Atmospheric carbon |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Ecology & Global Change (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 04 Nov 2020 13:21 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:29 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | BMC |
Identification Number: | 10.1186/s13021-020-00147-2 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:167527 |
Available Versions of this Item
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The impact of long dry periods on the aboveground biomass in tropical forests: 20 years of monitoring. (deposited 07 Jul 2020 11:29)
- The impact of long dry periods on the aboveground biomass in a tropical forest: 20 years of monitoring. (deposited 04 Nov 2020 13:21) [Currently Displayed]