First Research Trip Across Western Amazon Yields Surprising Results
A waterfall in the Brazilian rainforest. Conservation efforts in the Amazon help protect the world's largest supply of fresh water. (Photo by Bob Walker)
During his unprecedented expedition into the heart of the Amazon, Michigan State University geographer Bob Walker discovered surprising evidence that many of the Brazilian government’s efforts to protect the environment are working.
As expected, Walker and two fellow scientists – the first research team to travel a 700-mile stretch of the so-called Transamazon Highway in the western Amazon basin – confirmed the existence of illegal logging and gold-mining operations that threaten further damage to the world’s largest rainforest.
But the researchers also found massive areas of undisturbed forest in the form of nationally protected areas and indigenous reserves – as well as examples of where the government had halted unofficial road building, Walker said.
“We were kind of amazed by the number of good stories we actually saw,” said Walker, a veteran Amazon researcher whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation. “The environmental enforcement agencies in Brazil often do seem to be doing what they’re supposed to do.” (more…)
Lemurs of Madagascar Offer Clues to Global-Warming Rainforest Impact
Global warming may present a threat to animal and plant life even in biodiversity hot spots once thought less likely to suffer from climate change, according to a new study from Rice University.
Research by Amy Dunham, a Rice assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, detailed for the first time a direct correlation between the frequency of El Niño and a threat to life in Madagascar, a tropical island that acts as a refuge for many unique species that exist nowhere else in the world. In this case, the lemur plays the role of the canary in the coal mine.
The study in the journal Global Change Biology is currently available online and will be included in an upcoming print issue.
Dunham said most studies of global warming focus on temperate zones. “We all know about the polar bears and their melting sea ice,” she said. “But tropical regions are often thought of as refuges during past climate events, so they haven’t been given as much attention until recently.
“We’re starting to realize that not only are these hot spots of biodiversity facing habitat degradation and other anthropogenic effects, but they’re also being affected by the same changes we feel in the temperate zones.”
Dunham’s interest in lemurs, which began as an undergraduate student at Connecticut College, resulted in a groundbreaking study last year that provided new insight into a long-standing mystery: Why male and female lemurs are the same size. (more…)
Fires in Amazon Challenge Emission Reduction Program
This image shows evidence of fire leakage from a deforested land into the surrounding forest in Mato Grosso state, southeast Amazonia. (University of Exeter)
Fire occurrence rates in the Amazon have increased in 59% of areas with reduced deforestation and risks cancelling part of the carbon savings achieved by UN measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and degradation.
New research led by the University of Exeter, published on Friday 4 June, in Science, analysed satellite deforestation and fire data from the Brazilian Amazon to understand the influence of United Nation’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) policy on fire patterns in Amazonia. The NERC (National Environment Research Council) funded research shows that fire incidences may increase even with a decrease in deforestation rates.
Amazonian farmers are prone to keeping agricultural land free of new growth by ‘slash and burn’ methods, usually on a three to five yearly cycle. The extra carbon emitted by the leakage of fires from farms into surrounding forests edges and forest fragments as well as deforestation of forest regrowth, which are not accounted by the Brazilian’s deforestation monitoring system may therefore be partially negating carbon savings achieved through the UN REDD programme. (more…)
Innovative Plan to Save Rainforest, Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
An innovative proposal by the Ecuadorian government to protect an untouched, oil rich region of Amazon rainforest is a precedent-setting and potentially economically viable approach, says a team of environmental researchers from the University of Maryland, the World Resources Institute and Save America’s Forests.
The Ecuadorian proposal, known as the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, would protect a large area of pristine Amazon rainforest, by leaving untouched nearly one billion barrels of oil that lies beneath the Yasuní National Park in Ecuador. Under the initiative, the government would sell certificates linked to the value of the unreleased carbon to provide alternative revenue to that which would come from exploiting the oil reserves.
“This is a really novel approach that could fund a lot of rainforest protection,” said Clinton Jenkins, a research scientist in the University of Maryland’s department of biology. “It’s also an innovative way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions.”
“There has been a lot of talk about engineering ways to reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions by removing carbon from air and burying, or sequestering, it in the ground. This approach sequesters carbon by preventing oil from ever getting out of the ground,” said Jenkins. (more…)
Carbon-Offsetting and Conservation Can Both Be Winners in Rainforest
Logged rainforests can support as much plant, animal and insect life as virgin forest within 15 years if properly managed, research at the University of Leeds has found.
Because trees in tropical climates soak up large amounts of carbon dioxide, restoring logged forest through planting new trees could also be used in carbon trading, according to Dr David Edwards, from University’s Faculty of Biological Sciences.
Dr Edwards is calling for the inclusion of biodiversity-friendly strategies in carbon trading schemes to ensure that carbon off-setting projects support, rather than undermine, rainforest conservation.
Currently, large plantations of one type of tree, such as Eucalpytus, are popular as carbon off-setting or sequestration projects in the tropics because they also provide commercial benefits, but they do not support tropical biodiversity. (more…)
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