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，一个巨大的碳库，可能会影响全球气候变化的轨迹。然而，目前人们对阿马佐尼亚的碳平衡还没有很好的了解，科学家们就个别林地的大量碳吸收测量是否代表了更广泛的景观展开了激烈的辩论。该项目将使用基于激光的所谓“LIDAR”传感器进行飞机测量，以测量广阔的空间尺度(数百平方公里)的亚马逊森林的结构。这些调查，加上将森林结构与森林和大气之间的二氧化碳通量联系起来的数值模型，可以提供关于整个森林景观中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二氧化碳的源还是汇的争论，即森林在几个月和几年的时间里是排放还是吸收二氧化碳。这项研究的独特贡献是新的信息，这些信息将使我们能够评估阿马佐尼亚是碳汇(或碳源)的说法。这项拟议的研究涉及与碳循环、气候变化和人类土地利用相关的重要政策科学。除了促进研究生教育(包括巴西的一名女学生)带来的标准的更广泛的影响外，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.