For a few days we visited the Chiquibul forest nestled in the Maya Mountains, a biodiversity hotspot in Central America. This forest is a spectacular wilderness, breathtaking for a small country such as Belize, and packed with Mayan ruins. We stayed at the Las Cuevas Research Station.
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I have just returned from a visit our new project in Belize, SUSFOR. The project is funded by the Darwin Fund and is aimed at building forest monitoring capacity in Belize. I was hosted by Percy Cho, who is with the Belize Forestry Department and also a postdoc at Oxford with me for this project. Over our visit we spanned the length and breadth of this small but astonishingly varied country, from wet rainforest to pine savanna, from smallholder farms to vast agroindustrial clearings to breathtaking wilderness. Three things are particularly fascinating to me about Belize's forests: (1) the frequency of hurricane damage; (2) the widespread limestone bedrock leading to non-acidic tropical soils and (3) the extensive past legacy of the Mayan civilization. The hurricane damage can be spectacular even decades after the event, as if a giant invisible hand has snapped off the tree crowns, which for many trees have resprouted in twisted and eccentric forms. There is a new paper in Nature Geoscience that gives a unifying and elegant insight into how rainfall seasonality controls the seasonality of photosynthesis across the tropics Guan, K., Pan M., Li H., Wolf A., Wu J., Medvigy D., Caylor K.K., Sheffield J., Wood E.F., Malhi Y., Liang M., Kimball J.S., Saleska S., Berry J., Joiner J., Lyapustin A.I., Photosynthetic seasonality of global tropical forests constrained by hydroclimate, Nature Geoscience, early online, DOI:10.1038/ngeo2382 We have just an intensive workshop of our CHAMBASA project, a busy but productive week focussed on really getting to grips with the data we had collected in Peru in 2013 , looking at the relationships between leaf properties, forest plot properties and landscapes along our transect in Peru, combining field data, theory and aircraft to tackle this question. Guests from far way included Brian Enquist from Arizona, and Greg Asner and Robin Martin from California. A real highlight was the inauguration and revelation of our database, which has been a huge amount of work. Looking ahead, we have a follow-up in Hawaii in July, on a path to produce a special issue of papers later in the year. We have a new paper in Nature this week (led by Chris Doughty) which demonstrates the carbon cycle influence of the 2010 Amazon drought through close monitoring of our intensive carbon cycle plots. It demonstrates the power of the intensive monitoring approach we have developed through the GEM network. The paper is available here. Doughty, C.E., Metcalfe, D.B., Girardin, C.A.J., Farfan Amezquita, F., Galiano Cabrera, D., Huaraca Huasco, W., Silva-Espejo, J.E., Araujo-Murakami, A., da Costa, M.C., Rocha, W., Feldpausch, T.R., Mendoza, A.L.M., da Costa, A.C.L., Meir, P., Phillips, O.L. and Malhi, Y. (2015) Drought impact on forest carbon dynamics and fluxes in Amazonia. Nature, 519: 78-82. I have just returned from an excellent week with our ongoing plant traits campaign in Ghana, Kwaeemma ("Children of the Forest"). Since October, this team of 25 students and national service volunteers has been collecting data on plant traits and function along a gradient ranging from forest-savanna transition at Kogyae, through semi-deciduous forest at Bobiri, and ending up in evergreen wet rainforest at Ankasa in southwest Ghana. I joined the team in Ankasa. This lush green site is one of the hotspots of plant diversity in West Africa, possibly a Pleistocene refuge that stayed forest when much of West Africa turned to savanna or dry forest during dry periods. In the campaign we are collecting leaf, wood and tree traits from canopy trees along this transect The project is funded an ERC Advanced Investigator Award GEM-TRAIT, and a Royal Society-Leverhulme Africa Award. We hosted a fascinating and inspiring talk by Susan Canney on the conservation of the desert elephants of Mali, a fascinating case study of how to work well with local communities to achieve conservation. More details of the project can be found here: Here is a TedX mini-version of the talk: "The metabolism of a human-dominated planet" - public lecture at the Oxford Martin School20/1/2015 A video of this seminar is now available online and available below. 22 January, 1700-1830, Oxford Martin School Event details here: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/2031 We live in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, the Age of Us, of which climate change is just one aspect. The defining feature of this age is that sum of human activity (how many we are and what we are doing) has become large compared to the natural processes of the biosphere. The atmospheric waste products of our activity being the main driver of climate change. How can we measure how “large” we are, and how has our impact on the planet varied throughout human history? Professor Yadvinder Malhi, Professor of Ecosystem Science, will examine this question through the concept of social metabolism, how much energy we use to support our lifestyles, compared to the metabolism of the biosphere. With this concept in hand, we will travel from a world full of hunter gatherers after the end of the last Ice Age, through the dawn of farming, the Roman Empire, the industrial revolution and finally look at prospects for the 21st century. On the way we’ll examine whether our cities behave like termite colonies, and whether people walk faster in London than in Oxford. And you’ll find out how you are like King Kong… Join in on twitter with #2015climate Two censuses of forest inventory data from our 18 ha (300 m x 600 m) large forest dynamics plot at Wytham Woods are now available for download. The data can be requested online through the Smithsonian ForestGEO web portal.
These data are available to all, subject to the fair use agreement detailed on the website We have just published a description of the productive and carbon cycle of a plot in our local Wytham Woods research site. This is work emerging from the DPhil thesis of Katie Fenn. The work shows that the plot takes up 22 tonnes of carbon every year through photosynthesis, but less than 10% of this ends up as wood growth. Much more productivity ends up in the leaf canopy and even in fine roots. This is one of the few full descriptions anywhere of carbon cycling in mixed-age temperate broadleaf woodland (most work is on either plantations or coniferous forests), and forms part of our Global Ecosystems Monitoring network GEM. We also show how well our bottom-up carbon cycle measures track the eddy covariance measurements of total canopy CO2 exchange, giving increased confidence in both. The paper can be accessed here: Fenn, K., Malhi, Y., Morecroft, M., Lloyd, C. and Thomas, M. (2014) The carbon cycle of a maritime ancient temperate broadleaved woodland at seasonal and annual Scales. Ecosystems, 10.1007/s10021-014-9793-1. Supplementary info. The eddy covariance work is described in detail in a previous study: Thomas, M. V., Malhi, Y., Fenn, K. M., Fisher, J. B., Morecroft, M. D., Lloyd, C. R., Taylor, M. E., and McNeil, D. D (2011).: Carbon dioxide fluxes over an ancient broadleaved deciduous woodland in southern England, Biogeosciences, 8, 1595-1613, doi:10.5194/bg-8-1595-2011. |
AuthorYadvinder Malhi is an ecosytem ecologist and Professor of Ecosystem Science at Oxford University Archives
August 2019
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