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

亚马逊盆地的森林形成了地球上最大的连续完整的热带森林，这是一个巨大的碳库，可能会影响全球气候变化的轨迹。然而，亚马逊河流域目前的碳平衡并没有得到很好的理解，科学家们激烈地争论单个森林地块大量碳吸收的测量是否代表了更广泛的景观。该项目将使用激光进行飞机调查？基于所谓的“激光雷达”传感器来测量亚马逊森林在广阔空间尺度（数百平方公里）的结构。这些调查，加上将森林结构与森林和大气之间的CO2通量联系起来的数字模型，可以提供关于整个森林景观的自然干扰模式的空间分布的信息，以帮助令人信服地解决关于完整的亚马逊森林是大气CO2的源还是汇的辩论，即，森林是在数月或数年的时间里排放还是吸收二氧化碳。这项研究的独特贡献是新的信息，将使我们能够评估亚马逊是碳汇（或源）的说法。拟议的研究涉及与碳循环，气候变化和人类土地利用有关的重要政策相关科学。除了促进研究生教育（包括巴西的一名女学生）带来的更广泛的影响外，该项目还将促进美国和巴西研究小组之间的国际合作。

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.