Smithsonian Fragmentation Project threatened by Amazon Colonization Plan
The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, one of the most important long-term research efforts in the Amazon, is imperiled by new colonization proposed by the Brazilian federal agency SUFRAMA, according to a commentary in the July 26, 2007 journal Nature, co-authored by William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Regina Luizo of Brazils National Insti...Selective logging causes widespread destruction of Brazil's Amazon rainforest, study finds
Selective logging--the practice of removing one or two trees and leaving the rest intact--is often considered a sustainable alternative to clear-cutting, in which a large swath of forest is cut down, leaving little behind except wood debris and a denuded landscape. ... ...But a new satellite survey of the Amazon Basin in Brazil reveals that every year unregulated selective logging of mahogany and...Logging doubles threat to the Amazon, rivaling clear-cutting, study suggests
...This press release is also available in , published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.... ...Until now, satellite-based methods for measuring deforestation acr...Smithsonian-led Amazon research team wins scientific prize
A research team led by William Laurance, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, will be honored for their "Outstanding Paper in Landscape Ecology" by the International Association of Landscape Ecologists in Tucson, Ariz. April 12. Co-author Susan G. Laurance will accept the award on the teams behalf.... The paper, entitled "Rapid decay of tree-community compos...Mother knows best: Plant knowledge key to childhood health in remote Amazon
... The researchers, from the universities of Brandeis, Northw...Paper challenges 1491 Amazonian population theories
There's a scholarly debate brewing about whether pre-Columbian Amazonian...populations settled in large numbers across...Amazonia and created the modern forest setting that many conservationists...take to be natural.' ... This view has become fashionable among many...archaeologists and anthropologists, and is challenged in a recent paper...from Dr. Mark Bush of the Florida Institute of Technolo...Human's ecological footprint in 2015 and Amazonia revealed
... Modeling global average productivity to compare environmental tradeoffs and human-induced stressors in the environment Thomas Dietz (Michigan State University), Eugene Rosa (Washington State University) and Richard York (University of Oregon) studied the impact of humans on the environment in a recent study, "Driving the human ecological footprint," published in the February issue of...Large size crucial for Amazon forest reserves
... The article summarizes bird survey results from the world's largest and longest running experimental study of forest fragmentation the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, sponsored by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the Smithsonian Institution and the Nati...Fragmentation rapidly erodes Amazonian biodiversity
... ... The Amazon contains the planets most biologically diverse tree communities, with up to three hundred species occurring in an area the size of just two football fields. Th...Small-scale logging leads to clear-cutting in Brazilian Amazon
Stanford, CA-A team of scientists, led by Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, has discovered an important indicator of rain forest vulnerability to clear-cutting in Brazil. Their five-year study is the first to quantify the relationship between selective logging, where loggers extract individual trees from the rain forest, and complete deforestation, or clear-c...The Amazon in 2050: Implementing the law could save a million square kilometers of rainforest
Economic and political forces are rapidly transforming the forests of the Amazon basin, precipitating one of the world's greatest environmental crises. Through an inter-discplinary modeling project known as Amazon Scenarios, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amaznia (Brazil), with colleagues...Amazon rainforest greens up in the dry season
The Amazon rainforest puts on its biggest growth spurt during the dry season, according to new research....... The finding surprised the researchers....... "Most of the vegetation around the world follows a general pattern in which plants get green and lush during the rainy season and then during the dry season, leaves fall because there's not enough water in the soil to support plant growth," sa...First Amazon-Andean crop plant transfer and corn processing in Peru 3600-4000 years ago
Mouthwatering Peruvian cuisine like causa (mashed yellow potatoes layered with avocado and seafood) and carapulcra (dried potatoes and pork/chicken in peanut sauce) combine food crops from Amazon basin rainforests and Andean highlands. Smithsonian archaeologists and colleagues presenting in the prestigious journal, Nature1, uncover the first definitive evidence for this culinary, cultural link:...Amazonian terra preta can transform poor soil into fertile
The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe's richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground.... That's not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil -- known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths -- and say it can pull substantial amounts...Satellites show Amazon parks, indigenous reserves stop forest clearing
Conservation scientists generally agree that many types of protected areas will be needed to protect tropical forests. However, little is known about the comparative performance of inhabited and uninhabited reserves in slowing the most extreme form of forest disturbance: conversion to agriculture. In a paper recently published in Conservation Biology (2006, Vol 20, pages 65-73), an international...In bacterial diversity, Amazon is a 'desert'; Desert is an 'Amazon'
Ironically, in the diversity of soil bacteria, the otherwise species-rich Amazon is a more like a desert, while the arid desert is a teeming microbial Amazon, researchers have found. Their first-ever continental-scale genetic survey of soil bacteria revealed that the primary factor that seems to govern the diversity of soil bacteria is soil pH. Thus, the acidic soils of topical forests harbor few...Amazon trees much older than assumed, raising questions on global climate impact of region
Trees in the Amazon tropical forests are old. Really old, in fact, which comes as a surprise to a team of American and Brazilian researchers studying tree growth in the world's largest tropical region....... Using radiocarbon dating methods, the team, which includes UC Irvine's Susan Trumbore, found that up to half of all trees greater than 10 centimeters in diameter are more than 300 years old....Why the Amazon rainforest is so rich in species
Tropical areas of south and central America such as the Amazon rainforest are home to some 7500 species of butterfly compared with only around 65 species in Britain. UCL scientists have ruled out the common theory that attributed this richness of wildlife to climate change, in a paper published on 7th December by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences). ...... Instead...Ants, not evil spirits, create devil's gardens in the Amazon rainforest, study finds
For the first time, scientists have identified an ant species that produces its own natural herbicide to poison unwanted plants. ... ...Stanford University biologist Deborah M. Gordon and her co-workers describe the findings in the Sept. 22 issue of the journal Nature. The discovery was made during a four-year field study led by Stanford graduate student Megan E. Frederickson in the Amazon jungle...Amazon source of 5-year-old river breath
The rivers of South America's Amazon basin are "breathing" far harder cycling the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide more quickly than anyone realized. ... Most of the carbon being exhaled or outgassed as carbon dioxide from Amazonian rivers and wetlands has spent a mere 5 years sequestered in the trees, other plants and soils of the surrounding landscape, U.S. and Brazilian researchers report in...Woods Hole Research Center plans controlled burn in Amazon rainforest
Fire is an important agent of transformation in the Amazon landscape. Every year, low intensity fires burn thousands of square miles of Amazon forest. To study the effects of these fires on the forest, and the forests' ability to recover from repeated burning, Woods Hole Research Center scientists will burn two and a half square kilometers of forest in the transition forest of northern Mato Gross...On July 19, 2005, at the Society of Conservation Biology annual meetings, in Braslia, Brazil, the Woods Hole Research Center and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM) will hold an international symposium on the prospects for large-scale conservation of natural resources in the Amazon Basin. ......This region has entered a new era of natural resource destruction as the principle...Understanding how the Amazon River varies in time, what causes those variations, and how sensitive it will be to ongoing, and accelerating, deforestation is a focus of study for scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center. Population and development pressures in the last several decades have led to significant areas of deforestation in the Amazon, most in the eastern and southern portion of the...