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      Carbon uptake by mature Amazon forests has mitigated Amazon nations’ carbon emissions

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          Abstract

          Background

          Several independent lines of evidence suggest that Amazon forests have provided a significant carbon sink service, and also that the Amazon carbon sink in intact, mature forests may now be threatened as a result of different processes. There has however been no work done to quantify non-land-use-change forest carbon fluxes on a national basis within Amazonia, or to place these national fluxes and their possible changes in the context of the major anthropogenic carbon fluxes in the region. Here we present a first attempt to interpret results from ground-based monitoring of mature forest carbon fluxes in a biogeographically, politically, and temporally differentiated way. Specifically, using results from a large long-term network of forest plots, we estimate the Amazon biomass carbon balance over the last three decades for the different regions and nine nations of Amazonia, and evaluate the magnitude and trajectory of these differentiated balances in relation to major national anthropogenic carbon emissions.

          Results

          The sink of carbon into mature forests has been remarkably geographically ubiquitous across Amazonia, being substantial and persistent in each of the five biogeographic regions within Amazonia. Between 1980 and 2010, it has more than mitigated the fossil fuel emissions of every single national economy, except that of Venezuela. For most nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname) the sink has probably additionally mitigated all anthropogenic carbon emissions due to Amazon deforestation and other land use change. While the sink has weakened in some regions since 2000, our analysis suggests that Amazon nations which are able to conserve large areas of natural and semi-natural landscape still contribute globally-significant carbon sequestration.

          Conclusions

          Mature forests across all of Amazonia have contributed significantly to mitigating climate change for decades. Yet Amazon nations have not directly benefited from providing this global scale ecosystem service. We suggest that better monitoring and reporting of the carbon fluxes within mature forests, and understanding the drivers of changes in their balance, must become national, as well as international, priorities.

          Electronic supplementary material

          The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13021-016-0069-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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          Most cited references39

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          Old-growth forests as global carbon sinks.

          Old-growth forests remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at rates that vary with climate and nitrogen deposition. The sequestered carbon dioxide is stored in live woody tissues and slowly decomposing organic matter in litter and soil. Old-growth forests therefore serve as a global carbon dioxide sink, but they are not protected by international treaties, because it is generally thought that ageing forests cease to accumulate carbon. Here we report a search of literature and databases for forest carbon-flux estimates. We find that in forests between 15 and 800 years of age, net ecosystem productivity (the net carbon balance of the forest including soils) is usually positive. Our results demonstrate that old-growth forests can continue to accumulate carbon, contrary to the long-standing view that they are carbon neutral. Over 30 per cent of the global forest area is unmanaged primary forest, and this area contains the remaining old-growth forests. Half of the primary forests (6 x 10(8) hectares) are located in the boreal and temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. On the basis of our analysis, these forests alone sequester about 1.3 +/- 0.5 gigatonnes of carbon per year. Thus, our findings suggest that 15 per cent of the global forest area, which is currently not considered when offsetting increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, provides at least 10 per cent of the global net ecosystem productivity. Old-growth forests accumulate carbon for centuries and contain large quantities of it. We expect, however, that much of this carbon, even soil carbon, will move back to the atmosphere if these forests are disturbed.
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            Increasing carbon storage in intact African tropical forests.

            The response of terrestrial vegetation to a globally changing environment is central to predictions of future levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The role of tropical forests is critical because they are carbon-dense and highly productive. Inventory plots across Amazonia show that old-growth forests have increased in carbon storage over recent decades, but the response of one-third of the world's tropical forests in Africa is largely unknown owing to an absence of spatially extensive observation networks. Here we report data from a ten-country network of long-term monitoring plots in African tropical forests. We find that across 79 plots (163 ha) above-ground carbon storage in live trees increased by 0.63 Mg C ha(-1) yr(-1) between 1968 and 2007 (95% confidence interval (CI), 0.22-0.94; mean interval, 1987-96). Extrapolation to unmeasured forest components (live roots, small trees, necromass) and scaling to the continent implies a total increase in carbon storage in African tropical forest trees of 0.34 Pg C yr(-1) (CI, 0.15-0.43). These reported changes in carbon storage are similar to those reported for Amazonian forests per unit area, providing evidence that increasing carbon storage in old-growth forests is a pan-tropical phenomenon. Indeed, combining all standardized inventory data from this study and from tropical America and Asia together yields a comparable figure of 0.49 Mg C ha(-1) yr(-1) (n = 156; 562 ha; CI, 0.29-0.66; mean interval, 1987-97). This indicates a carbon sink of 1.3 Pg C yr(-1) (CI, 0.8-1.6) across all tropical forests during recent decades. Taxon-specific analyses of African inventory and other data suggest that widespread changes in resource availability, such as increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, may be the cause of the increase in carbon stocks, as some theory and models predict.
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              Continental-scale patterns of canopy tree composition and function across Amazonia.

              The world's greatest terrestrial stores of biodiversity and carbon are found in the forests of northern South America, where large-scale biogeographic patterns and processes have recently begun to be described. Seven of the nine countries with territory in the Amazon basin and the Guiana shield have carried out large-scale forest inventories, but such massive data sets have been little exploited by tropical plant ecologists. Although forest inventories often lack the species-level identifications favoured by tropical plant ecologists, their consistency of measurement and vast spatial coverage make them ideally suited for numerical analyses at large scales, and a valuable resource to describe the still poorly understood spatial variation of biomass, diversity, community composition and forest functioning across the South American tropics. Here we show, by using the seven forest inventories complemented with trait and inventory data collected elsewhere, two dominant gradients in tree composition and function across the Amazon, one paralleling a major gradient in soil fertility and the other paralleling a gradient in dry season length. The data set also indicates that the dominance of Fabaceae in the Guiana shield is not necessarily the result of root adaptations to poor soils (nodulation or ectomycorrhizal associations) but perhaps also the result of their remarkably high seed mass there as a potential adaptation to low rates of disturbance.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                o.phillips@leeds.ac.uk
                r.brienen@leeds.ac.uk
                Journal
                Carbon Balance Manag
                Carbon Balance Manag
                Carbon Balance and Management
                Springer International Publishing (Cham )
                1750-0680
                1 February 2017
                1 February 2017
                December 2017
                : 12
                : 1
                Affiliations
                School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT UK
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8993-6168
                Article
                69
                10.1186/s13021-016-0069-2
                5285296
                5446a55d-a609-4bb7-8c85-6b33a1498aca
                © The Author(s) 2017

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

                History
                : 8 July 2016
                : 9 December 2016
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000270, Natural Environment Research Council;
                Award ID: NE/B503384/1
                Award ID: NE/D01025X/1
                Award ID: NE/I02982X/1
                Award ID: NE/F005806/1
                Award ID: NE/D005590/1
                Award ID: NE/I028122/1
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004963, Seventh Framework Programme;
                Award ID: 283080
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000936, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation;
                Award ID: 1656
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000781, European Research Council;
                Award ID: 291585
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000288, Royal Society;
                Award ID: Wolfson Research Merit Award
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Research
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2017

                Environmental change
                amazonia,carbon balance,carbon sink,sequestration,land use change,climate change,tropical forests,ecosystem service

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