Synthesis of the land carbon fluxes of the Amazon region between 2010 and 2020

Abstract

The Amazon is the largest continuous tropical forest in the world and plays a key role in the global carbon cycle. Human-induced disturbances and climate change have impacted the Amazon carbon balance. Here we conduct a comprehensive synthesis of existing state-of-the-art estimates of the contemporary land carbon fluxes in the Amazon using a set of bottom-up methods (i.e., dynamic vegetation models and bookkeeping models) and a top-down inversion (atmospheric inversion model) over the Brazilian Amazon and the whole Biogeographical Amazon domain. Over the whole biogeographical Amazon region bottom-up methodologies suggest a small average carbon sink over 2010-2020, in contrast to a small carbon source simulated by top-down inversion (2010-2018). However, these estimates are not significantly different from one another when accounting for their large individual uncertainties, highlighting remaining knowledge gaps, and the urgent need to reduce such uncertainties. Nevertheless, both methodologies agreed that the Brazilian Amazon has been a net carbon source during recent climate extremes and that the south-eastern Amazon was a net land carbon source over the whole study period (2010-2020). Overall, our results point to increasing human-induced disturbances (deforestation and forest degradation by wildfires) and reduction in the old-growth forest sink during drought.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	This paper has 39 authors. You can scroll the list below to see them all or them all. Rosan, T.M. Sitch, S. O'Sullivan, M. Basso, L.S. Wilson, C. Silva, C. Gloor, E. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9384-6341 Fawcett, D. Heinrich, V. Souza, J.G. Silva Berrera, F.G. von Randow, C. Mercado, L.M. Gatti, L. Wiltshire, A. Friedlingstein, P. Pongratz, J. Schwingshackl, C. Williams, M. Smallman, L. Knauer, J. Arora, V. Kennedy, D. Tian, H. Yuan, W. Jain, A.K. Falk, S. Poulter, B. Arneth, A. Sun, Q. Zaehle, S. Walker, A.P. Kato, E. Yue, X. Bastos, A. Ciais, P. Wigneron, J.-P. Albergel, C. Aragão, L.E.O.C.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2024. 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/.
Dates:	Published: 22 January 2024 Published (online): 22 January 2024 Accepted: 5 January 2024
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:	08 Jan 2024 09:44
Last Modified:	06 Feb 2024 16:21
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature
Identification Number:	10.1038/s43247-024-01205-0
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:207172

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Synthesis of the land carbon fluxes of the Amazon region between 2010 and 2020

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