Collaborative Research: Airborne LIDAR Surveys of Forest Canopy Structure Across Amazonian Landscapes to Infer Large-scale Forest Biomass and Carbon Balance

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The forests of the Amazon basin form the largest contiguous intact tropical forest on Earth, a vast storehouse of carbon that could influence the trajectory of global climate change. However, the present-day carbon balance of Amazônia is not well understood, and scientists vigorously debate whether measurements of substantial carbon uptake in individual plots of forest are representative of the broader landscape. This project will conduct aircraft surveys using laser?based, so-called """"LIDAR"""" sensors to measure the structure of Amazon forests over broad spatial scales (hundreds of square kilometers). These surveys, together with numerical models that relate forest structure to fluxes of CO2 between the forest and the atmosphere, can provide information on the spatial distribution of natural disturbance patterns across the forest landscape to help convincingly resolve the debate about whether intact Amazon forests are a source or a sink for atmospheric CO2, i.e., whether the forests are emitting or taking up CO2 over periods of months and years. The unique contribution of this study is new information that will allow us to evaluate claims that Amazônia is a carbon sink (or a source). The proposed research addresses important policy-relevant science relating to carbon cycling, climate change, and human land uses. In addition to fostering standard broader impacts brought by education of graduate students (including a woman student in Brazil), this project will foster international collaborations between U.S. and Brazilian research groups.