scholarly journals Climate change and deforestation boost post-fire grass invasion of Amazonian forests

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno L. De Faria ◽  
Arie Staal ◽  
Philip A. Martin ◽  
Prajjwal K. Panday ◽  
Andrea D. Castanho ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Fire Frequency ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Tree Cover ◽  
Amazon Forest ◽  
Degraded Ecosystem ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Time Required ◽  
Amazonian Forests ◽  
Grass Invasion

ABSTRACTInteractions among climate change, deforestation and fires are changing the stability of the Amazon forest, and may promote transitions to degraded grassy ecosystem states. However, our ability to predict the locations in the Amazon that are most vulnerable to these transitions is limited. In this study we used a dynamic carbon model to evaluate how drought, climate change and deforestation could affect the probability of post-fire grass invasion across the Amazon, and identify where grass-fire feedbacks may promote the persistence of species-poor degraded forests with savanna-like structure. Our results suggest that, under current climatic conditions, post-fire grass invasion could affect 11% of the Amazon, with the south-eastern Amazon at highest risk of invasion. We forecast that under business as usual climate change, by the end of the century areas with a high probability of post-fire grass invasion will increase to 20% of the Amazon. In 10% of the Amazon fire return interval will be shorter than the time required for canopy recovery, implying high risk of irreversible shifts to a fire-maintained degraded ecosystem state. Although resilience in canopy regeneration is evident in areas with low fire frequency, increased fire frequency could inhibit regeneration even in forests where grass is currently excluded, and push the Amazon forests towards a tipping point causing large areas of forest to transition to low tree cover state.

scholarly journals Global warming in Amazonia: impacts and Mitigation

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1003-1011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Martin Fearnside
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Forest Fires ◽  
El Niño ◽  
El Nino ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Carbon Accounting ◽  
Amazon Forest ◽  
Temperature Oscillations

Global warming has potentially catastrophic impacts in Amazonia, while at the same time maintenance of the Amazon forest offers one of the most valuable and cost-effective options for mitigating climate change. We know that the El Niño phenomenon, caused by temperature oscillations of surface water in the Pacific, has serious impacts in Amazonia, causing droughts and forest fires (as in 1997-1998). Temperature oscillations in the Atlantic also provoke severe droughts (as in 2005). We also know that Amazonian trees die both from fires and from water stress under hot, dry conditions. In addition, water recycled through the forest provides rainfall that maintains climatic conditions appropriate for tropical forest, especially in the dry season. What we need to know quickly, through intensified research, includes progress in representing El Niño and the Atlantic oscillations in climatic models, representation of biotic feedbacks in models used for decision-making about global warming, and narrowing the range of estimating climate sensitivity to reduce uncertainty about the probability of very severe impacts. Items that need to be negotiated include the definition of "dangerous" climate change, with the corresponding maximum levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Mitigation of global warming must include maintaining the Amazon forest, which has benefits for combating global warming from two separate roles: cutting the flow the emissions of carbon each year from the rapid pace of deforestation, and avoiding emission of the stock of carbon in the remaining forest that can be released by various ways, including climate change itself. Barriers to rewarding forest maintenance include the need for financial rewards for both of these roles. Other needs are for continued reduction of uncertainty regarding emissions and deforestation processes, as well as agreement on the basis of carbon accounting. As one of the countries most subject to impacts of climate change, Brazil must assume the leadership in fighting global warming.

scholarly journals Resilience as a Moving Target: An Evaluation of Last Century Management Strategies in a Dry-Edge Maritime Pine Ecosystem

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 1151
Author(s):  
Daniel Moreno-Fernández ◽  
Miguel A. Zavala ◽  
Jaime Madrigal-González ◽  
Francisco Seijo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Management Strategies ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Forest Understory ◽  
Tree Cover ◽  
Global Changes ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Historical Management

Forests are intrinsically coupled to human dynamics, both temporally and spatially. This evolution is conditioned by global changes in climatic conditions (teleconnections) and distant socio-economical processes (telecoupling). The main goal of this study is to describe the teleconnections and telecoupling dynamics that have shaped structure and processes in a dry-edge—highly vulnerable to desertification—Mediterranean pine forest during the last century and to evaluate the contribution of historical management strategies to this coupled human and natural system’s (CHANS) overall resilience. For this study, we collected relevant human and natural system data from a dry edge Pinus pinaster Ait. located forest in Central Spain using a CHANS analytical framework operationalizing telecoupling and teleconnection. A key extractive economic activity in the studied forest was resin tapping, which was the main form of land use from the 1920s to the 1950s. Since the 1950s changes in the Spanish economy linked to the emergence of new resin-producing countries, such as China, led to a sharp decline in resin production. Despite additional human system transformations affecting forest governance (e.g., the Spanish Civil War, the transition to democracy, European integration, etc.) and changes in biophysical conditions linked to climate change (e.g., aridification, CO2 fertilization), the standing stocks of P. pinaster increased during the monitoring period due to sound technical and management planning bolstering overall resilience. These historical management decisions, we argue, successfully reconciled overall resilience goals (defined as the maintenance of forest function beyond and desertification avoidance) with three successive historical forest use challenges: intensive firewood collection by local communities in fragile sandy soils, extensive pastoralism in the forest understory and tradeoffs between resin tapping damaged trees, timber production and tree cover as well as the emerging risks of wildfire and climate change.

scholarly journals Response of European yews to climate change: a review

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. eR01 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Thomas ◽  
Xavier Garcia-Marti
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Fire Frequency ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Taxus Baccata ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Veteran Trees ◽  
Northern Edge ◽  
Management Priorities ◽  
Reduced Water ◽  
Rate Of Invasion

<p><em>Aim of study:</em><strong> </strong>Being the longest-lived of all European trees, capable of living significantly over 2,000 years, yew is highly likely to be negatively affected by climate change; this paper explores the changes in distribution and abundance. </p><p><em>Main results:</em> Yew is unlikely to migrate north due to its slow rate of invasion, its disjunct soil needs and an inability to cope with the expected rate of climate change. It will, however, retreat from the southern end of its range in Spain due to increased evapotranspiration allied to reduced rainfall. In the south, increased drought will be exacerbated by extreme drought and increased fire frequency. In drier areas at the northern edge of its range, yew will decline where growing on well-drained limestone outcrops with little shelter from the sun (increased evaporation) and reduced water availability due to limited root spread.  On wetter northern sites, yew should find better climatic conditions but will be slow to invade new areas due to poorer reproduction affected by reduced pollen production, population fragmentation and limited seed movement. Overall, without our intervention, yew will survive by inertia in the short-term but eventual become extinct in most areas. Of equal concern will be the loss of old veteran individuals and associated biodiversity. </p><p><em>Research highlights:</em> There is an urgent need for interventionist management for both old and young trees, relieving the stress on old veteran trees, and planting and maintaining seedlings through vulnerable young age. A list of management priorities is given.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Yew; <em>Taxus baccata</em>; Temperature; Precipitation; Seedlings; Bioclimate envelope; Species range.</p>

scholarly journals Hysteresis of tropical forests in the 21st century

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arie Staal ◽  
Ingo Fetzer ◽  
Lan Wang-Erlandsson ◽  
Joyce H. C. Bosmans ◽  
Stefan C. Dekker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Tropical Forests ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Change Scenario ◽  
Amazon Forest ◽  
Recent Climate ◽  
Severe Climate Change ◽  
The Tropics

Abstract Tropical forests modify the conditions they depend on through feedbacks at different spatial scales. These feedbacks shape the hysteresis (history-dependence) of tropical forests, thus controlling their resilience to deforestation and response to climate change. Here, we determine the emergent hysteresis from local-scale tipping points and regional-scale forest-rainfall feedbacks across the tropics under the recent climate and a severe climate-change scenario. By integrating remote sensing, a global hydrological model, and detailed atmospheric moisture tracking simulations, we find that forest-rainfall feedback expands the geographic range of possible forest distributions, especially in the Amazon. The Amazon forest could partially recover from complete deforestation, but may lose that resilience later this century. The Congo forest currently lacks resilience, but is predicted to gain it under climate change, whereas forests in Australasia are resilient under both current and future climates. Our results show how tropical forests shape their own distributions and create the climatic conditions that enable them.

scholarly journals Edge fires drive the shape and stability of tropical forests

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Hébert-Dufresne ◽  
Adam F. A. Pellegrini ◽  
Uttam Bhat ◽  
Sidney Redner ◽  
Stephen W. Pacala ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Scale ◽  
Remote Sensing Data ◽  
Fire Frequency ◽  
Propagation Model ◽  
Tree Cover ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Forest Patches ◽  
Tropical Regions ◽  
Frequency Changes ◽  
The Stability

AbstractIn tropical regions, fires propagate readily in grasslands but typically consume only edges of forest patches. Thus forest patches grow due to tree propagation and shrink by fires in surrounding grasslands. The interplay between these competing edge effects is unknown, but critical in determining the shape and stability of individual forest patches, as well the landscape-level spatial distribution and stability of forests. We analyze high-resolution remote-sensing data from protected areas of the Brazilian Cerrado and find that forest shapes obey a robust perimeter-area scaling relation across climatic zones. We explain this scaling by introducing a heterogeneous fire propagation model for tropical forest-grassland ecotones. Deviations from this perimeter-area relation determine the stability of individual forest patches. At a larger scale, our model predicts that the relative rates of tree growth due to propagative expansion and long-distance seed dispersal determine whether collapse of regional-scale tree cover is continuous or discontinuous as fire frequency changes.

Climate change and deforestation increase the vulnerability of Amazonian forests to post‐fire grass invasion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno L. De Faria ◽  
Arie Staal ◽  
Carlos A. Silva ◽  
Philip A. Martin ◽  
Prajjwal K. Panday ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Amazonian Forests ◽  
Grass Invasion

scholarly journals Odour Impact Assessment in a Changing Climate

Atmosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 1149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Piringer ◽  
Werner Knauder ◽  
Kathrin Baumann-Stanzer ◽  
Ivonne Anders ◽  
Konrad Andre ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Climate Scenarios ◽  
Climatic Parameters ◽  
Residential Areas ◽  
The Future ◽  
Stability Classification ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Impact

(1) Background: The impact of odour sources as stock farms on neighbouring residential areas might increase in the future because the relevant climatic parameters will be modified due to climate change. (2) Methodology: Separation distances are calculated for two Central European sites with considerable livestock activity influenced by different orographic and climatic conditions. Furthermore, two climate scenarios are considered, namely, the time period 1981–2010 (present climate) and the period 2036–2065 (future climate). Based on the provided climatic parameters, stability classes are derived as input for local-scale air pollution modelling. The separation distances are determined using the Lagrangian particle diffusion model LASAT. (3) Results: Main findings comprise the changes of stability classes between the present and the future climate and the resulting changes in the modelled odour impact. Model results based on different schemes for stability classification are compared. With respect to the selected climate scenarios and the variety of the stability schemes, a bandwidth of affected separation distances results. (4) Conclusions: The investigation reveals to what extent livestock husbandry will have to adapt to climate change, e.g., with impacts on today’s licensing processes.

scholarly journals Hysteresis of tropical forests in the 21st century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arie Staal ◽  
Ingo Fetzer ◽  
Lan Wang-Erlandsson ◽  
Joyce Bosmans ◽  
Stefan Dekker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Tropical Forests ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Change Scenario ◽  
Amazon Forest ◽  
Recent Climate ◽  
Severe Climate Change ◽  
The Tropics

&lt;p&gt;Tropical forests modify the conditions they depend on through feedbacks on different spatial scales. These feedbacks shape the hysteresis (history-dependence) of tropical forests, thus controlling their resilience to deforestation and response to climate change. Here we present the emergent hysteresis from local-scale tipping points and regional-scale forest-rainfall feedbacks across the tropics under the recent climate and a severe climate-change scenario. By integrating remote sensing, a global hydrological model, and detailed atmospheric moisture tracking simulations, we find that forest-rainfall feedback expands the range of possible forest distributions especially in the Amazon. The Amazon forest could partially recover from complete deforestation, but may lose that resilience later this century. The Congo forest lacks resilience, but gains it under climate change, whereas forests in Australasia are resilient under both current and future climates. Our results show how tropical forests shape their own distributions and create the climatic conditions that enable them.&lt;/p&gt;

Effect of Weather Factors on the Variability of Economic Characteristics in Sunflower Hybrids

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-84
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Economic Traits ◽  
Weather Factors

This article presents the results of twelve-year trials of the Region and Ryabota simple hybrids and the three-line hybrid Kameniar breeding laboratory of IOC NAANU hybrid labs, and analyzes their adaptation to ongoing climate change. The purpose of our work was to determine the formation of major economic traits in sunflower hybrids, depending on the agro-climatic conditions of the year.

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