Carbon recovery dynamics following disturbance by selective logging in Amazonian forests
- Université de la Guyane, UMR EcoFoG, France
- Cirad, UR Forests and Societies, France
- Embrapa Amazônia Oriental, Brazil
- Wageningen University, Netherlands
- University of Florida, United States
- CarbonForExpert, Switzerland
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- Instituto Boliviano de Investigación Forestal, Bolivia
- Embrapa Amazônia Ocidental, Brazil
- Florida International University, United States
- Embrapa Amapa, Brazil
- Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonia Peruana, Peru
- Embrapa Acre, Brazil
- University of São Paulo, Brazil
- Cirad, UMR EcoFoG, France
Abstract
When 2 Mha of Amazonian forests are disturbed by selective logging each year, more than 90 Tg of carbon (C) is emitted to the atmosphere. Emissions are then counterbalanced by forest regrowth. With an original modelling approach, calibrated on a network of 133 permanent forest plots (175 ha total) across Amazonia, we link regional differences in climate, soil and initial biomass with survivors' and recruits' C fluxes to provide Amazon-wide predictions of post-logging C recovery. We show that net aboveground C recovery over 10 years is higher in the Guiana Shield and in the west (21{plus minus}3 MgC ha-1) than in the south (12{plus minus}3 MgC ha-1) where environmental stress is high (low rainfall, high seasonality). We highlight the key role of survivors in the forest regrowth and elaborate a comprehensive map of post-disturbance C recovery potential in Amazonia.
Data availability
-
Data from: Post-disturbance carbon recovery in Amazonian forestsAvailable at Dryad Digital Repository under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
Article and author information
Author details
Eurídice N Honorio Coronado
Funding
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-10-LABEX-0025)
- Camille Piponiot
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP: 2013/16262-4 and 2013/50718-5)
- Edson Vidal
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2016, Piponiot et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,071
- views
-
- 588
- downloads
-
- 50
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Carbon recovery dynamics following disturbance by selective logging in Amazonian forests
eLife 5:e21394.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21394
Further reading
-
- Ecology
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Predicting how species diversity changes along environmental gradients is an enduring problem in ecology. In microbes, current theories tend to invoke energy availability and enzyme kinetics as the main drivers of temperature-richness relationships. Here, we derive a general empirically-grounded theory that can explain this phenomenon by linking microbial species richness in competitive communities to variation in the temperature-dependence of their interaction and growth rates. Specifically, the shape of the microbial community temperature-richness relationship depends on how rapidly the strength of effective competition between species pairs changes with temperature relative to the variance of their growth rates. Furthermore, it predicts that a thermal specialist-generalist tradeoff in growth rates alters coexistence by shifting this balance, causing richness to peak at relatively higher temperatures. Finally, we show that the observed patterns of variation in thermal performance curves of metabolic traits across extant bacterial taxa is indeed sufficient to generate the variety of community-level temperature-richness responses observed in the real world. Our results provide a new and general mechanism that can help explain temperature-diversity gradients in microbial communities, and provide a quantitative framework for interlinking variation in the thermal physiology of microbial species to their community-level diversity.
-
- Developmental Biology
- Ecology
Organisms require dietary macronutrients in specific ratios to maximize performance, and variation in macronutrient requirements plays a central role in niche determination. Although it is well recognized that development and body size can have strong and predictable effects on many aspects of organismal function, we lack a predictive understanding of ontogenetic or scaling effects on macronutrient intake. We determined protein and carbohydrate intake throughout development on lab populations of locusts and compared to late instars of field populations. Self-selected protein:carbohydrate targets declined dramatically through ontogeny, due primarily to declines in mass-specific protein consumption rates which were highly correlated with declines in specific growth rates. Lab results for protein consumption rates partly matched results from field-collected locusts. However, field locusts consumed nearly double the carbohydrate, likely due to higher activity and metabolic rates. Combining our results with the available data for animals, both across species and during ontogeny, protein consumption scaled predictably and hypometrically, demonstrating a new scaling rule key for understanding nutritional ecology.
