OKLAHOMA: EPSCoR's Xiao Leads International Team Studying Brazilian Amazon Carbon Loss
The Amazon rainforest covers approximately 50% of the world’s rainforests and nearly two-thirds of the Amazon is in Brazil. The Brazilian Amazon is important for global biodiversity, hydrology, climate, and carbon cycle. Accurate and timely data on spatial-temporal dynamics of the vegetation aboveground biomass (AGB) and forest area in the region are needed to understand the carbon balance, which is affected by land-use, logging and degradation, secondary forest regrowth, and climate.
Dr. Xiangming Xiao, from the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, has led an international team of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and research scientists (Yuanwei Qin, Jean-Pierre Wigneron, Philippe Ciais, Martin Brandt, Lei Fan, Xiaojun Li, Sean Crowell, Xiaocui Wu, Russell Doughty, Yao Zhang, Fang Liu, Stephen Sitch, and Berrien Moore III) to investigate the interannual changes in AGB and forest area by analyzing satellite-based annual AGB and forest area datasets. Specifically, the research team investigated the role of climate anomalies in the changes in forest area and AGB; whether recent changes in policies and human activities in 2019 have a detectable effect on forest area and AGB; and the relative contributions of deforestation and forest degradation (forest fragmentation, edge effects, logging, forest fire and drought) to interannual variation in AGB loss in the study period.
“We used the annual L-band vegetation optical depth (L-VOD) from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) passive microwave images that provide annual maps of AGB and annual forest area datasets to investigate the spatial–temporal dynamics of forest carbon in the Brazilian Amazon during 2010–2019,” Xiao said.
More information can be found in the following publication