Amazon rainforest mapped in unprecedented detail

Friday 27 January 2012Source: guardian.co.uk

An aerial image of the Amazon rainforest taken by tropical Greg Asner and his team. Photograph: Carnegie Department of Global Ecology/Stanford University

Five thousand metres above the most biodiverse corner of the Amazon, tropical ecologist Greg Asner and his team see a kaleidoscope of colours among a mass of green.

Huddled in a twin-engine Dornier 228 aeroplane called the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, the scientists are capturing multicoloured images of the Peruvian rainforest canopy that verge on the psychedelic.

Inside the plane, a machine known as a Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) bounces a laser beam off the forest canopy 400,000 times per second – the result is a three-dimensional map of the forest showing unprecedented detail.

In addition, a spectrometre, kept at a temperature of -131C (-204F), measures the biodiversity of the jungle in vivid colours by registering the chemical and optical properties of the forest canopy. The team can scan 360 sq km each hour.

"The technology that we have here gives us a first-ever look at the Amazon in its full three-dimensional detail, over very large regions," said Asner, who is conducting the research for the department of Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, based at Stanford University, California.

"[It's] the critical information that's missing for managing these systems, for conserving them and for developing policy to better utilise the Amazon basin as a resource, while still protecting what it has in terms of its biological diversity."

As well as measuring how the forest ecosystem is responding to the 2010 Amazon drought – the worst ever recorded – the technology accurately monitors deforestation and degradation, and has revealed unexpectedly high levels of biodiversity in high forest on the Andean rim of the Amazon basin.

The data could prove critical to the United Nation's Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) initiative, which will be the biggest future source of funding to protect the planet's tropical forest.

The programme is designed to compensate tropical countries for reducing deforestation and forest degradation.

"Redd cannot exist without scientifically monitored data on carbon stock," said Asner, who may have invented the most efficient way of measuring it to date.

Daniel Nepstad, director and president of the international programme at the Brazil-based Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam), and a leading expert on Redd programmes, described Asner as in "a league of his own in resolving the technical challenges that must be overcome for Redd to realise its potential."

Having scanned some of the Peruvian Amazon's most inaccessible places, Asner says the region has one of the "most incredible portfolios of biodiversity". But Asner said his initial research showed a radical increase of illicit alluvial gold mining in Peru's Amazon region of Madre de Dios since it was last mapped in 2009, making it the region's primary cause of deforestation – an area estimated to exceed 100 sq km.

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Pioneering six-mile walkway to attract 'eco tourists' to Amazon rainforest

23rd January 2012
Source: Daily Mail

A project to build a pioneering science centre with more than six miles of walkways will give tourists spectacular views in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

The £6.4m centre will be built by a British charity and will act as a research base for scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, provide jobs for Brazilian tribes and attract eco-tourists, according to The Sunday Times.

Tourist high-light: The walkway will give visitors a stunning view of the rainforest from high above the jungle floor

The ambitious walkway will be located in Roraima, a remote province of northeast Brazil, and will be designed by the same architects who created the London Eye and Kew Gardens’ treetop walkway.

Researchers will use the walkway to study the rainforest canopy while tourists will be able to enjoy stunning views from high above the jungle floor.

The project is being co-ordinated by the Amazon Charitable Trust and is expected to take two years to construct.

Robert Pasley-Tyler, a managing partner of the Amazon Charitable Trust, said of the project: ‘It will employ the local river tribe, giving them a way of making a living without destroying the forest, and also boost awareness around the world.

‘Visitors will also get to see the nearby pink dolphins and the giant otters before spending a relaxing day on a riverside beach.’

Roraima is the northernmost and least populated state of Brazil. It borders Venezuela and Guyana and renowned for its challenging hiking routes.

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In Brazil, Fears of a Slide Back for Amazon Protection

January 24, 2012
Source: New York Times

Deforestation in Brazil, driven largely by clearing land for cattle, as in Mato Grosso, above, has lessened. But there has been a shift under President Dilma Rousseff.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil has made great strides in recent years in slowing Amazon deforestation and showing the world it was serious about protecting the mammoth rain forest.

The rate of deforestation fell by 80 percent over the past six years, as the government carved out about 150 million acres for conservation — an area roughly the size of France — and used police raids and other tactics to crack down on illegal deforesters, according to both environmentalists and the government. Brazil’s former environment minister, Marina Silva, became an internationally respected defender of the Amazon. She ran for president in 2010 on the Green Party ticket and won 19.4 percent of the votes.

But since Dilma Rousseff was elected president in late 2010, there have been signs of a shift in the government’s attitude toward the Amazon. A provisional measure now allows the president to decrease the lands already created for conservation. The government is granting more flexibility for large infrastructure projects during the environmental licensing process. And a proposal would give Brazil’s Congress veto power over the recognition of indigenous territories.

“What is happening in Brazil is the biggest backsliding that we could ever imagine with regards to environmental policies,” said Ms. Silva, who now devotes her time to environmental advocacy.

Now, a bill seeking to overhaul the 47-year-old Forest Code, a central piece of environmental legislation, is the most serious test yet of Ms. Rousseff’s stance on the environment.

The debate over the law has revealed the stark disconnect between a population that is increasingly supportive of conserving the Amazon and a Congress in which agricultural interests in the country’s rural north and northeast still hold sway. The furor comes as Brazil is set to hold a United Nations conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro in June.

Before taking office last January, Ms. Rousseff promised to veto any revision of the Forest Code that granted amnesty to landowners who had previously deforested illegally. Then her government negotiated a version of the code, approved by the Senate in December, that would give amnesty to farmers who broke the law before 2008 — provided they agreed to plant new trees. The House is expected to debate the legislation once again in March, with Ms. Rousseff holding final veto power.

The fight over the Forest Code has stoked the age-old struggle over development versus conservation in Brazil, a country that bears the weight of international pressure to protect the Amazon from deforestation because its sheer scale could affect global climatic conditions. Ms. Rousseff, a former energy minister, has so far flashed a more pro-development stance, environmentalists say, shifting the balance from the administration of her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who appointed Ms. Silva.

Agriculture represents 22 percent of Brazil’s gross domestic product. The so-called ruralists in Congress say that the old code is holding back Brazil’s agricultural potential and that it needs updating to allow more land to be opened up to production. Environmentalists counter that there is already enough land available to double production and that the proposed changes would open the door to a surge in deforestation.

Last May, the House approved a more sweeping amnesty for those who had illegally deforested, outraging environmentalists and scientists. It did not help that the deputies refused to receive a group of respected Brazilian scientists that issued a report condemning the changes.

“In the House, there was very little consultation with scientists,” said Carlos Nobre, a scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research who specializes in climate issues. Still, he said, scientists “waited too long to realize that the House wanted to radically change the Forest Code, creating a broad and unrestricted license to deforest.”

Ms. Silva, who was raised in the Amazon, resigned in 2008 after a backlash by rural governors to restrictions on illegal deforestation she had put in place. But she left what environmentalists consider an effective policy to control Amazon deforestation. Among other tactics, Mr. da Silva’s government used satellite images to home in on deforesters, organized police raids and blacklisted the worst offenders.

“The ruralists have pushed so much to change the Forest Code because the government actually started enforcing it under Marina Silva,” said Stephan Schwartzman, director for tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington.

The vote in the House showed how heavily represented the less developed north and northeast are in Brazil’s Congress, a relic of the military dictatorship.

“The skewed proportional representation in Brazil has shown that the environmentalists have much less power in Congress than they have in public opinion,” said Gilberto Câmara, director of the National Institute for Space Research, which monitors Amazon deforestation.

Days after the House vote last May, a poll by Datafolha showed that 85 percent of Brazilians believed the reformed code should prioritize forests and rivers, even if it came at the expense of agricultural production.

After weeks of debate, the bill the Senate approved in December was somewhat more palatable to environmentalists. Rather than outright amnesty for past illegal deforestation, the Senate version lets farmers replant to avoid fines. The legislation now goes back to the House.

“We have to reconcile the generation of income with sustainability,” Izabella Teixeira, the current environment minister, said after the vote.

For Marcos Jank, president of the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association, a major reason to change the code is to legalize countless Amazon properties lacking land titles that have complicated the tracking of illegal activity. “When you have a Forest Code that legalizes land titles, then that has the effect of reducing deforestation, not increasing it,” he said.

The government claims the code will reforest about 60 million acres, much of it in the Amazon, which the Environment Ministry calls “the largest reforestation program in the world.” But who will pay for all those new trees? And will the government enforce the replanting requirements?

“The small producers don’t have the money to replant,” Mr. Jank said. “You need to develop programs to help them.”

There are also questions about the size of lands being exempted from the legal requirement to preserve 80 percent of the trees in Amazon properties. The new law would exempt “small” properties of up to four “fiscal modules,” which in the Amazon are almost 1,000 acres combined.

“That is a large property in any part of the world,” Mr. Nobre said. “I see great risk here if this definition is maintained.”

Despite the concerns, there is no denying that deforestation in Brazil, driven largely by clearing land for inefficient cattle grazing, has been on a downward trend. Beyond that, a new generation of satellites over the next two years will give Brazil access to images from seven satellites, up from the current two.

If people abide by the law — a big if — Mr. Câmara and other scientists are predicting that the Brazilian Amazon has a chance by 2020 to become a “carbon sink,” in which the amount of forest being replanted is larger than the amount being deforested.

“President Rousseff is extremely aware of this,” Mr. Câmara said. “When I told her, she almost fell off her chair.”

But to make that happen, “there has to be very strong government financing and support for people to recover the forest,” he said.

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Big trees, like the old-growth forests they inhabit, are declining globally

January 26, 2012
Source: mongabay.com

Already on the decline worldwide, big trees face a dire future due to habitat fragmentation, selective harvesting by loggers, exotic invaders, and the effects of climate change, warns an article published this week in New Scientist magazine.

Reviewing research from forests around the world, William F. Laurance, an ecologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, provides evidence of decline among the world's "biggest and most magnificent" trees and details the range of threats they face. He says their demise will have substantial impacts on biodiversity and forest ecology, while worsening climate change.

"To persist, big trees need a safe place to live and long periods of stability," he told mongabay.com via email. "But time and stability are becoming very rare commodities in our modern world."

Giant trees offer critical habitat and forage for wildlife, while transpiring massive amounts of water through their leaves, contributing to local rainfall. Old trees also lock up massive amounts of carbon — in some forests they can account for up to a quarter of living biomass.

But their ability to sequester carbon and render other ecosystem services is threatened by human activities. Some of the world's largest trees are particularly targeted by loggers. The oldest trees are among the most valuable and therefore the first to be cut in "virgin" forest areas.

Big trees are also sensitive to fragmentation, which exposes them to stronger winds and drier conditions. Laurance's own work in the Amazon has shown substantial die-off of canopy giants in small forest fragments. Their susceptibility seems counter-intuitive given big trees' life histories, which invariably include periods of drought and other stress.

"All around the tropics, big canopy and emergent trees are succumbing to strong droughts," Laurance said. "That's been a surprise to me and many other ecologists, because big, ancient trees would have had to survive many droughts in the past."

Forest giants may suffer disproportionately from climate change, writes Laurance in New Scientist, highlighting research in La Selva, Costa Rica by David and Deborah Clark.

"Trees are probably getting a double-whammy when the thermometer rises,' says David Clark. “During the day, their photosynthesis shuts down when it gets too warm, and at night they consume more energy because their metabolic rate increases, much as a reptile’s would do when it gets warmer.” With less energy being produced in warmer years and more being consumed just to survive, there is less energy available for growth.

The Clarks’ hypothesis, if correct, means tropical forests could shrink over time. The largest, oldest trees would progressively die off and tend not to be replaced. Alarmingly, this might trigger a positive feedback that could destabilize the climate: as older trees die, forests would release some of their stored carbon into the atmosphere, prompting a vicious circle of further warming, forest shrinkage and carbon emissions.

Laurance notes climate change is having less direct impacts on forests, including creating conditions for exotic pathogens to thrive. For example, pathogens such as Dutch Elm Disease, introduced by trade or circumstance, can devastate native forests.

All told, the outlook for big trees is not good, according to Laurance.

"The decline of big trees foretells a different world where ancient behemoths are replaced by short-lived pioneers and generalists that can grow anywhere, where forests store less carbon and sustain fewer dependent animals, where giant cathedral-like crowns become a thing of the past."

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Geology has split the Amazon into two distinct forests

January 19, 2012
Source: mongabay.com

Aerial photo of an Amazon rainforest tributary in Peru. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.

The common view of the Amazon is that it is one massive, unbroken forest. This impression is given by maps which tend to mark the Amazon by a large glob of green or even by its single name which doesn't account for regional changes. Of course, scientists have long recognized different ecosystems in the Amazon, most especially related to climate. But a new study in the Journal of Biogeography has uncovered two distinct forest ecosystems, sharply divided, caused by million of years of geologic forces.

"We look at a boundary of over 300 kilometers between two geological formations, the Nauta Formation and the Pebas Formation," lead author Mark Higgins with Duke University told mongabay.com. "The forests of these two geological formations differ by almost 90 percent in their plant species and this turnover occurs in under two kilometers. So, we see an abrupt and almost complete change in plant species between the two formations."

The major difference in the two Amazonian forests, which split in northern Peru, is soil fertility: the Pebas Formation is 15 times more fertile than the Nauta. This means that the two forests support very different plant species.

"On the poor soils, the plants invest very heavily in roots and leaf defenses, to acquire and hold onto scarce nutrients; while on rich soils, the plants are free to invest heavily in height and competition for light," explains Higgins, who says the different ecosystems are easily identifiable.

"While the Pebas Formation forests look like your typical tall rainforest, the poor-soil Nauta Formation forests are a different matter completely. In these forests [...] the ground is often covered by a spongy mat of roots up to 10 centimeters in depth. Sprouting from this root mat you can find hundreds of tiny roots climbing up small palms and saplings, looking for nutrients in leaves caught above the ground. At times I felt that if I stood still long enough they'd start climbing me too. Due to their strong investment in roots and in leaf defenses, these trees invest much less in height and girth, and the forest is generally shorter with many small stems. Sometimes, the canopy in these forests opens up completely and the ground is dominated by massive ground-dwelling bromeliads. Really weird stuff."

The distinct nature of the forests is so strong that it can be viewed in satellite images. Higgins says their findings add a new layer to current understanding of Amazonian ecosystems.

"We propose that geology provides a framework over which variations due to climate are superimposed. In any case, the existence of large-area units in Amazonian forests strongly supports the ecoregion-based mapping and planning of the WWF, The Nature Conservancy, and others. However, our findings also suggest that these maps may need to be substantially redrawn to reflect these underlying divisions."

The identification of such broadly different ecosystems should also play a role in conservation efforts argues the paper. For example forests in the bizarre Nauta Formation have been largely ignored to date both by conservationists and researchers.

"These poor-soil forests are distributed across northern Peru, but are essentially unknown and severely underrepresented in existing protected areas," explains Higgins. "One of the most common plant species found on these poor soils was previously unreported in Peru prior to our work, and we have found populations of bird species that are otherwise unknown except for small patches in northern Peru. In short, we believe that many of these rare species will turn out to be widespread. The new Nanay River Protected Area in northern Peru is a good start, but our findings suggest there is much more to be done. Luckily, mapping and protecting these unique ecosystems could be achieved in months rather than decades given the tools we describe."

Higgins adds that conservation should be more focused on protecting the great variety of the world's ecosystems, instead of simply pursuing protection of charismatic habitats that draw considerably more attention and dollars.

"For me, the aim of conservation planning is to ensure that the full range of ecosystems are represented in protected area systems. Simply protecting the most species-rich, or the most tall and impressive forests will only protect one environment and one set of evolutionary strategies, and this is not the future I am aiming for," he says. "Instead, we should aim to include the full spectrum of ecosystems and evolutionary strategies in our protected areas. I think that this is also a much more compelling strategy than chasing hotspot after hotspot, or simply following political expediency."

Behind the curtain: the Andes

The research doesn't end there: Higgins and colleagues next sought determine how had this happened: how is it that the Amazon ecosystem could shift from one ecosystem to another in some cases within a few hundred meters?

"Based on our results, the geological and biological patterns we see in lowland Amazonia are the result of the uplift of the Andes mountain range, hundreds to thousands of kilometers away. The Andean uplift creates these patterns through its control of drainage patterns in the vast Amazon basin, alternately depositing and eroding massive geological formations. This has happened in three phases spanning 25 million years, all of which contribute to the patterns we see today," says Higgins.

The story begins around 25 million years ago when the Andes began to rise, the geologic uplift created a massive water body across parts of today's Amazon.

"Because these were very low-energy conditions, sediments were able to settle without too much leaching or removal, resulting in a very deep band of fertile sediments called the Pebas Formation," says Higgins. As the Andes continued to rise from 10-5 million years ago, swift-moving rivers appeared, including the Amazon River. But this was a high-energy environment and sediments lost their nutrients, causing "the Pebas Formation [to be] buried beneath a shallow band of low-fertility sediments called the Nauta Formation (in Peru) or the Ica Formation (in Brazil)."

Finally, erosion over the past five million years in western Amazonia has led to the exposure of the Pebas Formation in some regions.

"Put another way, we are looking at two geological formations: the older, underlying, and more fertile Pebas Formation; and the younger, overlying, and poor-soil Nauta Formation. The Nauta Formation sits on top of the Pebas Formation like layers in a cake. Cutting though the top layer (Nauta Formation) exposes the layer beneath (Pebas Formation). When this happens we get clear discontinuities between the two formations, and thus clear differences in soils and plants," explains Higgins.

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Saving the Amazon Rainforest

January 16, 2012
Source: The Scientist

Over $100 million in international donations means the Yasuní ITT Initiative, Ecuador’s plan to avoid drilling for oil beneath a pristine Amazonian rainforest, will go forward. The Yasuní project is designed to conserve one of Earth’s most biodiverse forests, above Yasuní National Park’s Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oilfields, while preventing 410 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, ScienceInsider reported.

Yasuní-funded projects are planned to head off global warming in several ways—by preventing the destruction of rainforest and through reforestation projects (because forests will absorb CO2 already in the atmosphere, and the burning of fossil fuels (which would reduce CO2 emissions). By conserving part of Ecuador’s rainforest, the initiative would also preserve the livelihoods and territory of two isolated indigenous tribes.

The Yasuní ITT Initiative relies on annual donations world-wide, and the recent $100 million means the project is on track for now. And the project now has a new goal of raising $219 billion in the next 2 years. Oil currently dominates Ecuador’s export revenue, and environmental observers hope that Yasuní could be one step toward helping wean Ecuador off its reliance on oil.

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Amazon shifting to carbon emitter, says experts

January 19 2012
Source: Independent Online

Paris - The Amazon Basin, traditionally considered a bulwark against global warming, may be becoming a net contributor of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a result of deforestation, researchers said on Wednesday.

In an overview published in the journal Nature, scientists led by Eric Davidson of the Woods Hole Research Centre in Massachusetts say the Amazon is “in transition” as a result of human activity.

Over 50 years, the population has risen from six million to 25 million, triggering massive land clearance for logging and agriculture, they said.

The Amazon's carbon budget - the amount of CO2 that it releases into the atmosphere or takes from it - is changing although it is hard to estimate accurately, they said.

“Deforestation has moved the net basin-wide budget away from a possible late 20th-century net carbon sink and towards a net source,” according to their paper.

Mature forests such as the Amazon are big factors in the global-warming equation.

Their trees suck up CO2 from the atmosphere through the natural process of photosynthesis.

But when they rot or are burned, or the forest land is ploughed up, the carbon is returned to the air, adding to the greenhouse effect.

The paper estimates that the biomass of the Amazon contains a whopping 100 billion tonnes of carbon - the equivalent of more than 10 years of global fossil-fuel emissions.

Global warming, unleashing weather shifts, could release some of this store, it warned.

“Much of the Amazon forest is resilient to seasonal and moderate drought, but this resilience can and has been exceeded with experimental and natural severe droughts, indicating a risk of carbon loss if drought increases with climate change.”

The paper also noted that there had been extreme droughts and floods on the Tocantins and Araguaia basins, whose rivers drain the heavily deforested Cerado region.

“Where deforestation is widespread at local and regional scales, the dry season duration is lengthening and wet season discharge is increasing,” it warned. - Sapa-AFP

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