NERC
Urgency: Assessing the Impacts of the Amazon Drought
Oliver Phillips and Jon Lloyd have won a NERC Urgency grant to study the impact of the 2005 Amazon drought on the forest. Sandra Patino (visiting research fellow) and Tim Baker (NERC research fellow) are also involved, together with colleagues in Earth Sciences and from Oxford, and numerous collaborators across South America and Europe. It means that Leeds Geography is the proud holder of the first ever 'Full Economic Cost' grant that NERC have awarded.
The drought was exceptional, and the suppression of Amaazon rainfall may have been linked to the unprecedented violence of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season (exceptionally warm sea temperatures caused intense convection in the Atlantic, and what goes up must come down...). The Times Higher Education Supplement reported that trees were "devastated by the drought", but in truth no-one knows the big picture of the impacts in Amazonia. We are hoping to find the forest is rather more resilient than that, by examining population dynamics, carbon isotopes, and other signatures of forest condition in the wake of the drought. What we find will provide early clues to how the Amazon may respond to the increasing temperature and water stress forecast as climate change intensifies over coming years.
Several international teams have been involved in fieldwork at our network of permanent plots across the Amazon in Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Guyana, and Venezuela, in 2006 and 2007.