NERC
NERC Accelerated Growth of Amazon Trees
Our overall goal is to explore how the world's largest tropical forest, Amazonia, is faring in an era of rapid atmospheric change. Already there are reports of ecological change in mature forests, with increasing biomass, growth, and dynamics, but it is unclear what factor is accelerating tree growth and what the impacts have been on biodiversity (the species) and on ecosystem functions (such as carbon storage). These structural and ecological changes, combined with the known sensitivity of tropical forest composition to climatic change in the Pleistocene and Holocene, suggest that it is inevitable that tropical forest composition will change in response to atmospheric change, as particular species are favoured by higher carbon dioxide, changing climate, and changing dynamics.
Much greater scientific effort is warranted in understanding this complex and emerging threat, both in terms of the focus of theoretical and modelling effort, and in the monitoring of tropical biodiversity changes on the ground. This project will bring together sufficient intellectual and physical resources to enable scientists, for the first time, to assess the nature and extent of compositional change in the world's largest tropical forest, and to reveal the likely mechanism(s) behind this change. 13 of the world's leading tropical ecologists will contribute the accumulated data and experience of 25 years of monitoring forest plots across the Amazon, and access to unique sources of Amazon plant ecology in our quest to discover and explain biodiversity changes.