Produção Nacional
Revisado por pares
Does the disturbance hypothesis explain the biomass increase in basin‐wide Amazon forest plot data?
2009; Wiley; Volume: 15; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.01891.x
ISSN1365-2486
AutoresManuel Gloor, Oliver L. Phillips, Jon Lloyd, Simon L. Lewis, Yadvinder Malhi, Timothy R. Baker, Gabriela López‐González, J. Peacock, S. Almeida, A. C. ALVES De OLIVEIRA, Esteban Álvarez‐Dávila, Iêda Leão do Amaral, Luzmila Arroyo, Gerardo A. Aymard C., Olaf Bánki, Lilian Blanc, Damien Bonal, Paulo Brando, Kuo‐Jung Chao, Jérôme Chave, Nállarett Dávila, T. Erwin, José Natalino Macedo Silva, Anthony Di Fiore, Ted R. Feldpausch, André Victor Lucci Freitas, Rafael Herrera, Níro Higuchi, Eurídice N. Honorio Coronado, E. Jiménez, Timothy J. Killeen, W. F. Laurance, Casimiro Mendoza, Abel Monteagudo, Ana Andrade, David Neill, Dan Nepstad, P. Núñez Vargas, María Cristina Peñuela Mora, Antonio Peña Cruz, Adriana Prieto, Nigel C. A. Pitman, C. A. Quesada, Rafael P. Salomão, Marcos Silveira, Matthias Schwarz, Juliana Stropp, Fredy Ramírez, Hirma Ramírez, Agustín Rudas, Hans ter Steege, Nadson de Pablo Costa Silva, Arturo Balderas Torres, John Terborgh, Rodolfo Vásquez, Geertje van der Heijden,
Tópico(s)Fire effects on ecosystems
ResumoAbstract Positive aboveground biomass trends have been reported from old‐growth forests across the Amazon basin and hypothesized to reflect a large‐scale response to exterior forcing. The result could, however, be an artefact due to a sampling bias induced by the nature of forest growth dynamics. Here, we characterize statistically the disturbance process in Amazon old‐growth forests as recorded in 135 forest plots of the RAINFOR network up to 2006, and other independent research programmes, and explore the consequences of sampling artefacts using a data‐based stochastic simulator. Over the observed range of annual aboveground biomass losses, standard statistical tests show that the distribution of biomass losses through mortality follow an exponential or near‐identical Weibull probability distribution and not a power law as assumed by others. The simulator was parameterized using both an exponential disturbance probability distribution as well as a mixed exponential–power law distribution to account for potential large‐scale blowdown events. In both cases, sampling biases turn out to be too small to explain the gains detected by the extended RAINFOR plot network. This result lends further support to the notion that currently observed biomass gains for intact forests across the Amazon are actually occurring over large scales at the current time, presumably as a response to climate change.
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