Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink

By R. Brienen, O. Phillips, T. Feldpausch, Emanuel Gloor, T. Baker, J. Lloyd, Lopez-Gonzalez, A. Monteagudo-Mendoza, Y. Malhi, S. Lewis and 83 more. Nature, 2015

1,044 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide records indicate that the land surface has acted as a strong global carbon sink over recent decades, with a substantial fraction of this sink probably located in the tropics, particularly in the Amazon. Nevertheless, it is unclear how the terrestrial carbon sink will evolve as climate and atmospheric composition continue to change. Here we analyse the historical evolution of the biomass dynamics of the Amazon rainforest over three decades using a distributed network of 321 plots. While this analysis confirms that Amazon forests have acted as a long-term net biomass sink, we find a long-term decreasing trend of carbon accumulation. Rates of net increase in above-ground biomass declined by one-third during the past decade compared to the 1990s. This is a consequence of growth rate increases levelling off recently, while biomass mortality persistently increased throughout, leading to a shortening of carbon residence times. Potential drivers for the mortality increase include greater climate variability, and feedbacks of faster growth on mortality, resulting in shortened tree longevity. The observed decline of the Amazon sink diverges markedly from the recent increase in terrestrial carbon uptake at the global scale, and is contrary to expectations based on models.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e43256238dbfcf1fe37aac918a6d2d033e22d380

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Citations in the corpus

Land-use and climate change risks in the Amazon and the need of a novel sustainable development paradigm (2016, background): “However, from field inventories carried out in 321 plots from 1983 to 2011, it was observed that the Amazon forest could be moving from a carbon sink to a carbon source ecosystem (131).”
Conservative species drive biomass productivity in tropical dry forests (2016, background): “Net changes in forest above-ground biomass are the result of three processes of biomass dynamics: biomass gain from recruiting trees, biomass growth of surviving trees and biomass loss from mortality (Brienen et al. 2015; Rozendaal & Chazdon 2015).”
Climate change and ecosystems: threats, opportunities and solutions (2020, background): “As examples, long-term forest monitoring has provided important evidence about the biosphere carbon sink which helps slow down the rate of climate change, and its potential future pathway [10].”
Plant responses to rising vapor pressure deficit. (2020, background): “Rising VPD may also be involved in driving increased Amazonian tree mortality (Brienen et al., 2015; McDowell et al., 2018).”
Accurate delineation of individual tree crowns in tropical forests from aerial RGB imagery using Mask R-CNN (2023, background): “However, the strength of the carbon sink is diminishing as a result of global warming (Brienen et al., 2015; Hubau et al., 2020) and there are concerns that forests are reaching a tipping point beyond which they could switch irreversibly to open savanna systems (Chai et al., 2021).”
The broad footprint of climate change from genes to biomes to people (2016, background): “Across large expanses of the Amazon, there has been an overall reduction in aboveground biomass owing to increased climate variability over the past three decades (129).”
Global change effects on humid tropical forests: Evidence for biogeochemical and biodiversity shifts at an ecosystem scale (2016, background): “Data form 321 plots in the Amazon basin over 30 years showed a net decrease in aboveground plant C stocks of 0.033mgCha 1 yr 1, primarily because of increased tree mortality during the 2005 and 2010 droughts [Brienen et al., 2015].”