This is a list of most recent publications by Centre staff Dr Sophie Flack-Prain led a study on how the capacity of Amazon forests to sequester carbon is threatened by climate-change-induced shifts in precipitation patterns. She combined a process model with observational data from seven intensively studied forest plots along an Amazon drought stress gradient. Variation in leaf area index was the key controller of changing photosynthesis along the gradient, more important than changes in photosynthetic capacity, or changes to temperature and radiation. These results emphasise the importance of monitoring variations and changes in LAI across the Amazon to understand its carbon sink: Flack-Prain, S., P Meir, Y Malhi, TL Smallman and M Williams (2019). The Importance of Physiological, Structural and Trait Responses to Drought Stress in Driving Spatial and Temporal Variation in GPP across Amazon Forests. Biogeosciences in press Centre researcher Prof Mathew Williams is a member of the European Space Agency mission advisory group for BIOMASS, ESA's first forest mission. This paper describes the mission in detail, with launch planned for 2022 and satellite construction costing >£300M. The data from this mission will be used by Centre scientists to map and analyse changes in forest cover, biomass and C cycling. Critically, this mission will provide insights into biomass change in the densest equatorial forests, for the first time: Quegan, S., Le Toan, T., Chave, J., Dall, J., Exbrayat, J.-F., Minh, D. H. T., Lomas, M., D'Alessandro, M. M., Paillou, P., Papathanassiou, K., Rocca, F., Saatchi, S., Scipal, K., Shugart, H., Smallman, T. L., Soja, M. J., Tebaldini, S., Ulander, L., Villard, L., and Williams, M (2019). The European Space Agency BIOMASS mission: Measuring forest above-ground biomass from space, Remote Sensing of the Environment, 227, 44-60, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.03.032. Dr Steve Hancock co-authored the NASA GEDI mission paper (a satellite lidar for measuring forest structure and biomass) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666017220300018 Steve also co-wrote a paper on testing how GEDI data can help us to map bird species distributions: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab80ee/meta This article was published on 2022-10-27
