Amazonia

Human's ecological footprint in 2015 and Amazonia revealed

A recent study shows human population size and affluence are the main drivers of human-caused environmental stressors, while urbanization, economic structure and age of population have little effect. Modeling global average productivity to compare environmental tradeoffs and human-induced stresso...

Scientists discover Amazon river is 11 million years old

...Sciences "This new research has large implications for our understanding of South American paleogeography and the evolution of aquatic organisms in amazonia and on the Atlantic coast. The origin of the Amazon river is a defining moment: a new ecosystem came into being at the same time as the uplifting An...

Amazon carbon sink threatened by drought

...g tropical North Atlantic may cause hotter and more intense dry seasons. The 2005 drought sharply reversed decades of carbon absorption, in which amazonia helped slow climate change. In normal years the forest absorbs nearly 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. The drought caused a loss of more than 3...

Smithsonian scientists receive coveted BBVA Ecology and Conservation Award

...l Forest Remnants by William Laurance and Richard Bierregaard, Lessons from amazonia by Richard Bierregaard, Thomas Lovejoy, and others, Climate Change and Biod...romoted some of the most important and creative conservation initiatives in amazonia and elsewhere in the tropics, such as the debt-for-nature swaps promoted by...

Lovejoy and Laurance, BBVA Foundation award in ecology

...mense value. The jury of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award also singled out both researchers' endeavors in training new generations of amazonia researchers and in sharing skills and knowledge to ensure their work is carried on for years to come; indeed their conservation practices have become ...

National Science Foundation funds research addressing enduring questions of life

...ed pre-Columbian human influences. By collecting soil samples throughout amazonia and measuring and dating any charcoal they contain that was deposited by fi.... This study, which will include the most extensive soil sampling survey of amazonia ever conducted, will help reveal whether Amazonia's unparalleled biodiversi...

Univ. of Arizona receives $2.5 million to study Amazon forests and climate change

...such as those in the tropics," Saleska said. "Because the forests of the Amazon basin form the largest contiguous, intact tropical forest on Earth, amazonia is a storehouse of carbon whose fate will influence the fate of climate change globally," said Saleska, also a member of Biosphere 2's science steerin...

Paper challenges 1491 Amazonian population theories

...zonian populations settled in large numbers across amazonia and created the modern forest setting that many co... as they do not support the contention that all of amazonia is a 'built landscape' and therefore a product of ...e in one district, four in the other, that much of amazonia has not been transformed by human actions, and ide...

Amazon trees much older than assumed, raising questions on global climate impact of region

...e overestimating the forests' capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere." As part of the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in amazonia (LBA), the researchers revealed an interesting portrait of tree life beneath the limbs of the large trees that dominate tropical forests. They found t...

Logging doubles threat to the Amazon, rivaling clear-cutting, study suggests

...rketable tree species are cut and logs are transported offsite to saw-mills. Little has been known about the extent or impacts of selective logging in amazonia until now, according to the authors. To detect and quantify the amount of selective logging in the five major timber production states of the Braz...