Treesearch

Amazon forests have experienced frequent and severe droughts in the past two decades. However, little is known about the large-scale legacy of droughts on carbon stocks and dynamics of forests. Using systematic sampling of forest structure measured by LiDAR waveforms from 2003 to 2008, here we show a significant loss of carbon over the entire Amazon basin at a rate of 0.3 ± 0.2 (95% CI) PgC yr−1 after the 2005 mega-drought, which continued persistently over the next 3 years (2005–2008). The changes in forest structure, captured by average LiDAR forest height and converted to above ground...

Cerrado is the second largest biome in South America and accounted for the second largest contribution to carbon emissions in Brazil for the last 10 years, mainly due to land-use changes. It comprises approximately 2 million km2 and is divided into 22 ecoregions, based on environmental conditions and vegetation. The most dominant vegetation type is cerrado sensu stricto (cerrado ss), a savanna woodland. Quantifying variation of biomass density of this vegetation is crucial for climate change mitigation policies. Integrating remote sensing data with adequate allometric equations and...

The impact of Hurricane Maria on the U.S. Caribbean was used to study the causes of remotely-sensed spatial variation in the effects of (1) vegetation index loss and (2) landslide occurrence. The vegetation index is a measure of canopy ‘greenness’, a combination of leaf chlorophyll, leaf area, canopy cover and structure. A generalized linear model was made for each kind of effect, using idealized maps of the hurricane forces, along with three landscape characteristics that were significantly associated. In each model, one of these characteristics was forest fragmentation, and another was a...

Despite sustained declines in Amazon deforestation, forest degradation from logging and fire continues to threaten carbon stocks, habitat, and biodiversity in frontier forests along the Amazon arc of deforestation. Limited data on the magnitude of carbon losses and rates of carbon recovery following forest degradation have hindered carbon accounting efforts and contributed to incomplete national reporting to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). We combined annual time series of Landsat imagery and high-density airborne lidar data to characterize the variabilit...

The United States is at an infrastructural crossroads. First, the climate is changing faster than built infrastructure and the institutions that manage and maintain it. Recent extreme weather events highlight the precarious state of the nation’s infrastructure and the ability of cities to adapt to climate change. After the nation in 2016 broiled through its hottest summer on record, 2017 began with one of the wettest winters on record for California and the Pacific Northwest. The 2017 hurricane season proved to be the most devastating and costly in the nation’s history.

Coastal plains of all tropical and subtropical latitudes are the habitat for a number of highly specialized plants able to establish in a range of sandy to clayey soils, submitted to periodical flooding from rainfall and tides, tolerant to large variations of salinity of soils interstitial water, withstanding coastal winds and sea-salt spray, and submitted to yearlong high solar irradiation and day temperatures. In northern South America semi-arid climates predominate in the southern Caribbean coasts from 10 to 15° N, an area that includes from the Goajira peninsula in Colombia to the...

Fine‐scale information about urban vegetation and social‐ecological relationships is crucial to inform both urban planning and ecological research, and high spatial resolution imagery is a valuable tool for assessing urban areas. However, urban ecology and remote sensing have largely focused on cities in temperate zones. Our goal was to characterize urban vegetation cover with sub‐meter (<1 m) resolution aerial imagery, and identify social‐ecological relationships of urban vegetation patterns in a tropical city, the San Juan Metropolitan Area, Puerto Rico. Our specific objectives were to...

A variety of physical factors such as climatic and geologic conditions and the ecological processes that take place within habitats such as succession, self-organization, and evolution generate novelty in ecosystems (sensu Radeloff et al., 2015). Hutchinson (1965) united the physical and ecological sources of novelty in his classic essay titled the ecological theater and evolutionary play. In Hutchinson’s construct, ecological novelty was the result of an evolving process (the evolutionary play) taking place within the ecological context of the habitat (the ecological theater). Hutchinson’s...

One of the challenges in the restoration of degraded lands is the re-establishment of soil structure and fertility. Novel forests that regenerate on recently abandoned and degraded agricultural lands are among the first biotic systems that begin the process of soil rehabilitation. The rate of litter decomposition and associated element mobility is one of many processes that contribute to the understanding of how ecosystem-level processes restore eroded soils. We studied the stoichiometry of Spathodea campanulata leaves decomposing in novel subtropical moist forests. We found that the speed...

Amazon droughts, including the 2015–2016 El Niño, may reduce forest net primary productivity and increase canopy tree mortality, thereby altering both the short- and the longterm net forest carbon balance. Given the broad extent of drought impacts, inventory plots or eddy flux towers may not capture regional variability in forest response to drought. We used multi-temporal airborne Lidar data and field measurements of coarse woody debris to estimate patterns of canopy turnover and associated carbon losses in intact and fragmented forests in the central Brazilian Amazon between 2013–2014...