A team of 80 scientists, both Brazilian and foreign, analyzed the regions within the Amazon where the forest is most likely to feel the effects of global warming. The research indicates that previous studies may have underestimated the droughts that could affect the biome, putting trees in the south and west of the Amazon in particular at risk.
The supervisor of the study, David Galbraith, from the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom, says that “understanding the limits that these forests are capable of supporting is a great challenge.
scientific. Our study provides new insights into one of the main of these thresholds: drought.” This was the first assessment of its kind carried out across the entire Amazon — nationally and internationally — with this focus on environmental responses to a hotter, drier climate.
Julia Tavares, a Brazilian ecologist also at the University of Leeds during the research, comments that, although people think of the Amazon as a homogeneous place, “it is formed by numerous forest regions that pass through different climatic zones, from those that are already very dry to those that are extremely wet.” The team’s objective would therefore be to identify the impacts in these distinct areas.
The team collected samples from 540 trees of 129 species in 11 different locations in Brazil, Peru and Bolivia. This enabled them to determine how much each variety and its respective region is capable of withstanding heat and drought, while removing and storing carbon present in the atmosphere. Although plants in the south are already the most adapted to drought, they are the ones that are most vulnerable to climate change — they would already be closer to the limit they are capable of withstanding.
In the regions of the Amazon where plant species live in extremely humid conditions, the trees are relatively safe so far. These areas, corresponding to the center and east of the biome, were the most studied so far, which led to a false impression that the entire forest had the same resilience.
With up to 15% of the entire global carbon stock, understanding how the Amazon rainforest is subject to changes in the near future is vital to ensure that what is already a climate crisis does not get worse.
Source: Nature Via: Science Daily
