Erika Berenguer

Anthropogenic disturbance in tropical forests can double biodiversity loss from deforestation

Concerted political attention has focused on reducing deforestation, and this remains the cornerstone of most biodiversity conservation strategies. However, maintaining forest cover may not reduce anthropogenic forest disturbances, which are rarely considered in conservation programmes. These disturbances occur both within forests, including selective logging and wildfires, and at the landscape level, through edge, area and isolation effects. Until now, the combined effect of anthropogenic disturbance on the conservation value of remnant primary forests has remained unknown, making it impossible to assess the relative importance of forest disturbance and forest loss. Here we address these knowledge gaps using a large data set of plants, birds and dung beetles (1,538, 460 and 156 species, respectively) sampled in 36 catchments in the Brazilian state of Pará. Catchments retaining more than 69–80% forest cover lost more conservation value from disturbance than from forest loss. For example, a 20% loss of primary forest, the maximum level of deforestation allowed on Amazonian properties under Brazil’s Forest Code, resulted in a 39–54% loss of conservation value: 96–171% more than expected without considering disturbance effects. We extrapolated the disturbance-mediated loss of conservation value throughout Pará, which covers 25% of the Brazilian Amazon. Although disturbed forests retained considerable conservation value compared with deforested areas, the toll of disturbance outside Pará’s strictly protected areas is equivalent to the loss of 92,000–139,000 km2 of primary forest. Even this lowest estimate is greater than the area deforested across the entire Brazilian Amazon between 2006 and 2015 (ref. 10). Species distribution models showed that both landscape and within-forest disturbances contributed to biodiversity loss, with the greatest negative effects on species of high conservation and functional value. These results demonstrate an urgent need for policy interventions that go beyond the maintenance of forest cover to safeguard the hyper-diversity of tropical forest ecosystems.

Brazil's environmental leadership at risk

Mining and dams threaten protected areas Over the past two decades, Brazil has emerged as an environmental leader, playing a prominent role in international fora such as the United Nations (UN) Conferences on Sustainable Development. The country has earned praise for the expansion of its protected area (PA) network and reductions in Amazon deforestation. Yet these successes are being compromised by development pressures and shifts in legislation. We highlight concerns for the newly elected government regarding development of major infrastructure and natural resource extraction projects in PAs and indigenous lands (ILs).

How pervasive is biotic homogenization in human-modified tropical forest landscapes?

Land-cover change and ecosystem degradation may lead to biotic homogenization, yet our understanding of this phenomenon over large spatial scales and different biotic groups remains weak. We used a multi-taxa dataset from 335 sites and 36 heterogeneous landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon to examine the potential for landscape-scale processes to modulate the cumulative effects of local disturbances. Biotic homogenization was high in production areas but much less in disturbed and regenerating forests, where high levels of among-site and among-landscape β-diversity appeared to attenuate species loss at larger scales. We found consistently high levels of β-diversity among landscapes for all land cover classes, providing support for landscape-scale divergence in species composition. Our findings support concerns that β-diversity has been underestimated as a driver of biodiversity change and underscore the importance of maintaining a distributed network of reserves, including remaining areas of undisturbed primary forest, but also disturbed and regenerating forests, to conserve regional biota.

A social and ecological assessment of tropical land uses at multiple scales: the Sustainable Amazon Network

Science has a critical role to play in guiding more sustainable development trajectories. Here, we present the Sustainable Amazon Network (Rede Amazônia Sustentável, RAS): a multidisciplinary research initiative involving more than 30 partner organizations working to assess both social and ecological dimensions of land-use sustainability in eastern Brazilian Amazonia. The research approach adopted by RAS offers three advantages for addressing land-use sustainability problems: (i) the collection of synchronized and co-located ecological and socioeconomic data across broad gradients of past and present human use; (ii) a nested sampling design to aid comparison of ecological and socioeconomic conditions associated with different land uses across local, landscape and regional scales; and (iii) a strong engagement with a wide variety of actors and non-research institutions. Here, we elaborate on these key features, and identify the ways in which RAS can help in highlighting those problems in most urgent need of attention, and in guiding improvements in land-use sustainability in Amazonia and elsewhere in the tropics. We also discuss some of the practical lessons, limitations and realities faced during the development of the RAS initiative so far.

Toward an integrated monitoring framework to assess the effects of tropical forest degradation and recovery on carbon stocks and biodiversity

Tropical forests harbor a significant portion of global biodiversity and are a critical component of the climate system. Reducing deforestation and forest degradation contributes to global climate-change mitigation efforts, yet emissions and removals from forest dynamics are still poorly quantified. We reviewed the main challenges to estimate changes in carbon stocks and biodiversity due to degradation and recovery of tropical forests, focusing on three main areas: (1) the combination of field surveys and remote sensing; (2) evaluation of biodiversity and carbon values under a unified strategy; and (3) research efforts needed to understand and quantify forest degradation and recovery. The improvement of models and estimates of changes of forest carbon can foster process-oriented monitoring of forest dynamics, including different variables and using spatially explicit algorithms that account for regional and local differences, such as variation in climate, soil, nutrient content, topography, biodiversity, disturbance history, recovery pathways, and socioeconomic factors. Generating the data for these models requires affordable large-scale remote-sensing tools associated with a robust network of field plots that can generate spatially explicit information on a range of variables through time. By combining ecosystem models, multiscale remote sensing, and networks of field plots, we will be able to evaluate forest degradation and recovery and their interactions with biodiversity and carbon cycling. Improving monitoring strategies will allow a better understanding of the role of forest dynamics in climate-change mitigation, adaptation, and carbon cycle feedbacks, thereby reducing uncertainties in models of the key processes in the carbon cycle, including their impacts on biodiversity, which are fundamental to support forest governance policies, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.

Disentangling the contribution of multiple land covers to fire-mediated carbon emissions in Amazonia during the 2010 drought

Abstract In less than 15 years, the Amazon region experienced three major droughts. Links between droughts and fires have been demonstrated for the 1997/1998, 2005, and 2010 droughts. In 2010, emissions of 510 ± 120 Tg C were associated to fire alone in Amazonia. Existing approaches have, however, not yet disentangled the proportional contribution of multiple land cover sources to this total. We develop a novel integration of multisensor and multitemporal satellite‐derived data on land cover, active fires, and burned area and an empirical model of fire‐induced biomass loss to quantify the extent of burned areas and resulting biomass loss for multiple land covers in Mato Grosso (MT) state, southern Amazonia—the 2010 drought most impacted region. We show that 10.77% (96,855 km2) of MT burned. We estimated a gross carbon emission of 56.21 ± 22.5 Tg C from direct combustion of biomass, with an additional 29.4 ± 10 Tg C committed to be emitted in the following years due to dead wood decay. It is estimated that old‐growth forest fires in the whole Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA) have contributed to 14.81 Tg of C (11.75 Tg C to 17.87 Tg C) emissions to the atmosphere during the 2010 fire season, with an affected area of 27,555 km2. Total C loss from the 2010 fires in MT state and old‐growth forest fires in the BLA represent, respectively, 77% (47% to 107%) and 86% (68.2% to 103%) of Brazils National Plan on Climate Change annual target for Amazonia C emission reductions from deforestation.

Developing cost-effective field assessments of carbon stocks in human-modified tropical forests

Across the tropics, there is a growing financial investment in activities that aim to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, such as REDD+. However, most tropical countries lack on-the-ground capacity to conduct reliable and replicable assessments of forest carbon stocks, undermining their ability to secure long-term carbon finance for forest conservation programs. Clear guidance on how to reduce the monetary and time costs of field assessments of forest carbon can help tropical countries to overcome this capacity gap. Here we provide such guidance for cost-effective one-off field assessments of forest carbon stocks. We sampled a total of eight components from four different carbon pools (i.e. aboveground, dead wood, litter and soil) in 224 study plots distributed across two regions of eastern Amazon. For each component we estimated survey costs, contribution to total forest carbon stocks and sensitivity to disturbance. Sampling costs varied thirty-one-fold between the most expensive component, soil, and the least, leaf litter. Large live stems (≥10 cm DBH), which represented only 15% of the overall sampling costs, was by far the most important component to be assessed, as it stores the largest amount of carbon and is highly sensitive to disturbance. If large stems are not taxonomically identified, costs can be reduced by a further 51%, while incurring an error in aboveground carbon estimates of only 5% in primary forests, but 31% in secondary forests. For rapid assessments, necessary to help prioritize locations for carbon- conservation activities, sampling of stems ≥20cm DBH without taxonomic identification can predict with confidence (R2 = 0.85) whether an area is relatively carbon-rich or carbon-poor—an approach that is 74% cheaper than sampling and identifying all the stems ≥10cm DBH. We use these results to evaluate the reliability of forest carbon stock estimates provided by the IPCC and FAO when applied to human-modified forests, and to highlight areas where cost savings in carbon stock assessments could be most easily made.

Idiosyncratic responses of Amazonian birds to primary forest disturbance.

As humans continue to alter tropical landscapes across the world, it is important to understand what environmental factors help determine the persistence of biodiversity in modified ecosystems. Studies on well-known taxonomic groups can offer critical insights as to the fate of biodiversity in these modified systems. Here we investigated species-specific responses of 44 forest-associated bird species with different behavioural traits to forest disturbance in 171 transects distributed across 31 landscapes in two regions of the eastern Brazilian Amazon. We investigated patterns of species occurrence in primary forests varyingly disturbed by selective-logging and fire and examined the relative importance of local, landscape and historical environmental variables in determining species occurrences. Within undisturbed and disturbed primary forest transects, we found that distance to forest edge and the biomass of large trees were the most important predictors driving the occurrence of individual species. However, we also found considerable variation in species responses to different environmental variables as well as inter-regional variation in the responses of the same species to the same environmental variables. We advocate the utility of using species-level analyses to complement community-wide responses in order to uncover highly variable and species-specific responses to environmental change that remain so poorly understood.

Seeing the woods through the saplings: Using wood density to assess the recovery of human‐modified Amazonian forests

Most of the worlds remaining tropical forests have been affected by either selective logging, understorey fires, fragmentation or are regrowing in areas that were previously deforested. Despite the ubiquity of these human‐modified forests, we have a limited knowledge of their potential to recover key traits linked to ecosystem processes and consequent services. Here we present data from 31,095 trees and saplings distributed across 121 plots of undisturbed and disturbed primary forests as well as secondary forests in the eastern Amazon. We examined the post‐disturbance recovery trajectory of an important plant functional trait, wood density. We tested whether human‐modified Amazonian forests are experiencing a rapid or a slow, or even impeded, recovery of this trait, which is associated with the provision of a fundamental ecosystem service—carbon storage. As expected, we found that the plot‐level wood density of trees and saplings in disturbed primary and secondary forests was significantly lower than in undisturbed forests. However, there was no significant difference in the average wood density of saplings between disturbed primary and secondary forests, possibly indicating a process of secondarization. We also found evidence that the recovery of wood density in human‐modified forests is being severely disrupted due to edge effects (in the case of disturbed primary forests) and high liana densities (in the case of both disturbed primary and secondary forests). Surprisingly, these two factors were more important predictors of wood density recovery than the time elapsed since the disturbance event. Synthesis. Plant communities in human‐modified Amazonian forests appear to not be recovering a key functional property—wood density, which in turn may affect their ability to store carbon in the future. If the aim of conservation programs in tropical forests is to maintain existing rates of ecosystem functions, processes and services, then they must concentrate efforts on avoiding anthropogenic disturbance in areas of currently undisturbed forests. It is also vital to prevent further disturbance in human‐modified forests to avoid disrupting even more their recovery.

Quantifying immediate carbon emissions from El Niño-mediated wildfires in humid tropical forests

Wildfires produce substantial CO2 emissions in the humid tropics during El Niño-mediated extreme droughts, and these emissions are expected to increase in coming decades. Immediate carbon emissions from uncontrolled wildfires in human-modified tropical forests can be considerable owing to high necromass fuel loads. Yet, data on necromass combustion during wildfires are severely lacking. Here, we evaluated necromass carbon stocks before and after the 2015–2016 El Niño in Amazonian forests distributed along a gradient of prior human disturbance. We then used Landsat-derived burn scars to extrapolate regional immediate wildfire CO2 emissions during the 2015–2016 El Niño. Before the El Niño, necromass stocks varied significantly with respect to prior disturbance and were largest in undisturbed primary forests (30.2 ± 2.1 Mg ha−1, mean ± s.e.) and smallest in secondary forests (15.6 ± 3.0 Mg ha−1). However, neither prior disturbance nor our proxy of fire intensity (median char height) explained necromass losses due to wildfires. In our 6.5 million hectare (6.5 Mha) study region, almost 1 Mha of primary (disturbed and undisturbed) and 20 000 ha of secondary forest burned during the 2015–2016 El Niño. Covering less than 0.2% of Brazilian Amazonia, these wildfires resulted in expected immediate CO2 emissions of approximately 30 Tg, three to four times greater than comparable estimates from global fire emissions databases. Uncontrolled understorey wildfires in humid tropical forests during extreme droughts are a large and poorly quantified source of CO2 emissions. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The impact of the 2015/2016 El Niño on the terrestrial tropical carbon cycle: patterns, mechanisms and implications’.