Abstract ID: 214

‘Exploring the boundaries of Amazon resilience, in land use, water and carbon cycling’

Bart Kruijt, Carlos Nobre, Javier Tomassella, Flavio Luizao, Kasper Kok, Ronald Hutjes, Peter Verburg, Han Dolman, Fabricio Zanchi, Luciana Souza, Rita von Randow, Arnaldo Carneiro The Amazon is a vulnerable region, currently being threatened by many external and internal factors. Many papers in this conference will testify this. However, the vulnerability often is not a simple linear response to these factors, and in several cases the rainforests, the regional water and carbon cycles and even the land-use change processes themselves may be quite resilient to perturbations. For example, there is evidence that even severe fragmentation of the forests by deforestation does not disturb the hydrological cycle. Local hydrology of Terra Firme forest could limit vulnerability to droughts, but on the other hand soils can rapidly impoverish as a result from groundwater-table changes. Socio-economic factors in the deforestation dynamics may lead to regrowth and we should wonder whether land-use change may or may not respond with negative feed-backs to climate change, limiting its effects. We are studying a range of such effects in an integrated, interdisciplinary research programme. First results and highlights will be shown, among which experiments with varying a wet forest groundwater table, a multi-scale hydrology analysis and local-to continental scale studies of factors controlling deforestation. One of the unique elements of this programme is the linking of very diverse results through conceptual reasoning.

Session:  Biogeochemistry - The biogeochemistry of land-water interactions: integrating from small catchments to the basin.

Presentation Type:  Oral