Seminar: Land use and climate threats to tropical forests - Emanuel Gloor

Land use and climate threats to tropical forests

Emanuel Gloor, Luis Cattelan, Akhil Javad, Deepak Barua

Tropical forests provide an array of globally important ecosystem services, including carbon uptake and storage, tropical climate regulation and biodiversity maintenance. They are threatened by deforestation and experience an increasingly hotter and erratic climate. Roughly 40 years ago climate simulations suggested that if deforestation in Amazonia reaches a critical level (% 20 percent by area) a runaway effect may be triggered with the forest biome switching into a savannah biome. If so on the order of  80 PgC of carbon would be released to the atmosphere. As part of the MetOffice Brazil program (CSSP) we have developed a tool to relate changes in evaporation due e.g. to land use change to a change in precipitation downwind using a water vapour tracking model (WAMS 2layer). We have then implemented the tool into the MetOffice climate emulator IMOGEN. I’ll show some results using the tool to examine whether a runaway effect of deforestation above a certain level may lead to a savannah all across Amazonia.  A threat to Amazon forests is not only deforestation but also climate - independent from a runaway effect. Over the past years we have gained some understanding at what level tropical forest tree may not any longer be able to withstand heat and drought. I’ll focus on one diagnostic - effect of heat and high temperatures on deterioration of photosystems in leaves. Observations in several places across the tropics show that temperatures are coming close / exceed lethal levels with leaf temperatures during mid-day reaching substantially higher temperatures than surrounding air. I’ll show some results why this may be so and what the implications may be.

Wednesday 11^th November, 2-3pm, Roger Stevens LT10 and MS Teams

 Followed by refreshments in the SEES foyer

Speaker: Emanuel Gloor, Professor in Biochemical Cycling, School of Geography, University of Leeds