After Droughts, Amazon Forests Take Up To 3 Yrs To Recover Growth Rates; Carbon Uptake Falls
Severe droughts over the past two decades have affected the resilience of the Amazon Rainforest, a new study shows, with stretches of affected forest taking between one and three years to recover their usual growth rate.
The work by researchers from Brazil and Portugal focused on an analysis of primary productivity — the amount of organic matter produced by vegetation, which is a parameter commonly used to assess an ecosystem’s capacity for regeneration. In drought situations, the process of plants absorbing carbon dioxide to produce oxygen tends to take longer.
According to the study, the impacts were particularly severe during the droughts of 2005, 2010 and 2015, considered the worst of the century and a warning that events like these are becoming more frequent, now five years apart. The findings showed that carbon absorption during the period of recuperation after a drought was 13% lower than levels prior to the drought or in tracts of forest that were not affected by drought.
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Climatologist Jose Marengo, general coordinator of research and development at Brazil’s National Center for Natural Disaster Monitoring and Alerts (Cemaden), told Mongabay that while previous studies showed a decline in forest productivity during droughts, the new survey indicates a tendency for this parameter to be reduced in post-drought years. This, said Marengo, who was not involved in the new study, raises questions about “whether forests are in fact resilient.” The forest “may have been [resilient] in the 20th century, but in the 21st century droughts changed this figure and forests have low resilience in a scenario of more intense and frequent droughts on an increasingly hot planet,” Marengo added.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/barrage-of-droughts-weakens-amazons-capacity-to-bounce-back-study-finds/
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