Fragmented Amazon Basin Forests Particularly Vulnerable To Wind, Esp. Biggest Carbon-Storing Trees
Recent research finds that Amazonian trees in fragmented forest landscapes remain especially vulnerable to windstorms for several years after being impacted by fire — and that, in particular, larger trees that store more carbon are most at risk.
The research, the results of which were detailed in the Journal of Ecology last September, builds on the findings of a 2014 study led by Paulo Brando, an assistant scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. Using data gathered during a decade-long field experiment involving three 50-hectare rainforest plots on the edge of agricultural fields in southeastern Amazonia — one plot was burned every year, another was burned every three years, and one control site was left unburned — Brando and team were able to show that forest fires and extreme weather events like droughts can accelerate tree mortality and could even trigger Amazon forest dieback “in the near-term.”
A 30-minute, high-intensity windstorm that subsequently swept through the experimental forest plots afforded the researchers the opportunity to follow up on their 2014 study with an assessment of how fires affect the ability of tropical forests to withstand windstorms, and thus to examine how they might fare in a future where global climate change has made droughts and other extreme climatic events even more common.
“Suddenly this storm sweeps through and there are chairs flying around our camp. But as we were cleaning up, we had a moment of realization that we’d just sampled the tree plots the week before with a three-dimensional laser scanning system called LiDAR. We had a unique opportunity to study, with high certainty and in great detail, how each of the three plots survived the storm,” Brando said in a statement about the new study published in the Journal of Ecology, which was led by Divino Silvério of Brazil’s Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia and Universidade de Brasília. The researchers found that trees in the burned plots were not only more likely to be uprooted or to have snapped off, usually at the same height as the fire damage the tree had sustained in the past, but that those fire-and-windstorm-damaged trees were much more likely to die in ensuing years.
EDIT
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/03/combined-effects-of-fire-fragmentation-and-windstorms-leave-amazonian-trees-particularly-vulnerable/