Global climate change predictions and greenhouse gas models desperately need to be tested in the Amazon, home of 45 percent of the world’s tropical forest. The Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR), representing nearly fifty researchers from five Amazonian countries, Europe and the U.S., is a new effort to monitor biomass and dynamics of forests across the entire river basin.

Intact South American forests may be mopping up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere equivalent to the annual fossil fuel emissions of the entire European Union, thus slowing the rate of global climate change.

Climate change and forest fragmentation (Laurance et al. 2002), as well as surprising ecological changes such as newly reported increases in liana densities (Phillips et al. 2002), threaten to turn the Amazon into a major carbon source in the 21st Century, potentially accelerating climate change.

However, such hypotheses have not yet been systematically tested in different forest types. A major hindrance to cross-comparison is a lack of consistent methodology for the monitoring of forest plots across the Amazon basin. RAINFOR, coordinated by Yadvinder Malhi and Oliver Phillips from the U.K., aims to coordinate on-the-ground monitoring of Amazon forests to understand how this vast region responds to these changes.

To better understand how environmental factors operating at different spatial scales influence productivity and dynamics of Amazonian forests, RAINFOR is working with data from three clusters of long-term monitoring plots in the Eastern Amazon near Belem, Santarem and Manaus; in a high rainfall region of the NW Amazon near Iquitos Peru and Ecuador and in the SW Amazon near the base of the Andes. RAINFOR is also identifying other understudied areas of the Amazon basin where work is needed to improve model predictions.

The project will encourage researchers to adopt common protocols for data collection and will work to overcome methodological errors in existing data sets to help compare sites.

The initial RAINFOR work was part of the larger CARBONSINK project, the European contribution to the large scale biosphere-atmosphere experiment in Amazonia (LBA). The network currently includes participants from:
• Institute of Ecology and Resource Management, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
• Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK
• Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Belém, Brasil
• Equipo de Gestión Ambiental, Interconexión Eléctrica S.A. ISA., Medellín, Colombia
• Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, USA
• Museo de Historia Natural Noel Kempff Mercado, Santa Cruz, Bolivia
• New York University, New York, USA
• Department of Entomology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA
• Proyecto BOLFOR, Santa Cruz, Bolivia
• Herbario Amazonense, Universidad Nacional de la Amazonía Peruana, Iquitos, Peru
• Museo de Historia Natural Noel Kempff Mercado, Santa Cruz, Bolivia
• Departamento de Silvicultura Tropical, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Brasil
• Conservation International, Washington DC, USA
• Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Panama
• Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, INPA, Manaus, Brasil
• Max-Planck-Institut für Biogeochemie, Jena, Germany
• Herbario Vargas, Universidad Nacional San Antonio Abad del Cusco, Cusco, Perú
• Fundación Jatun Sacha, Quito, Ecuador
• Department of Botany, University of Georgia, Athens, USA
• Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
• Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
• CIFOR, Tapajos, Brasil & EMBRAPA Amazonia Oriental, Belém, Brasil
• Universidade Nacional de Brasilia, Brasilia, Brasil & Universidade Federale do Acre, Brasil
• ISRIC, Wageningen, Holland
• Center for Tropical Conservation, Duke University, Durham, USA
• Departmento de Ciencias Biológicas, Herbario QCA and Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador

For further information about the project and a complete list of participants, see:
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/projects/rainfor/

STRI contact: Dr. William Laurance, US tel. 202-786-2094, ext. 8252, Panama tel. 212-8252, laurancew@tivoli.si.edu

For direct inquiries, contact Yadvinder Malhi or Oliver Phillips (ymalhi@ed.ac.uk; oliverp@geog.leeds.ac.uk)


(STRI), with headquarters in Panama City, Panama, is one of the world's leading centers for basic research on the ecology, behavior and evolution of tropical organisms. http://www.stri.org)

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