The inverted forest: Aboveground and notably large belowground carbon stocks and their drivers in Brazilian savannas.

Savannas contribute to ca. 30 % of the total terrestrial net primary productivity and are responsible for significant carbon storage. Savannas in South America are mostly found within the Cerrado Domain, which is very threatened and presents remarkable carbon pools.

A 7000-year history of changing plant trait composition in an Amazonian landscape; the role of humans and climate.

Tropical forests are shifting in species and trait composition, but the main underlying causes remain unclear because of the short temporal scales of most studies. Here, we develop a novel approach by linking functional trait data with 7000 years of forest dynamics from a fossil pollen record of Lake Sauce in the Peruvian Amazon. We evaluate how climate and human disturbances affect community trait composition.

Persistence of Coffea arabica and its relationship with the structure, species diversity and composition of a secondary forest in Brazil.

Understanding the relationships between Coffea arabica L. and the native tree community of secondary forests regrowing after the abandonment of coffee plantations is important because, as a non-native species in the Neotropics, coffee can outcompete native species, reducing diversity and forests ecosystem services. We aimed to answer three questions: 1) Does coffee regeneration in secondary forests differ between shaded and unshaded abandoned plantations?; 2) How is coffee basal area related to structural attributes, species diversity and composition of the native community?; and 3) Do the relationships between coffee and native community differ between tree and sapling components? We sampled the tree and sapling components in a seasonal tropical dry forest that were previously used as shaded and unshaded coffee plantations.

Fast changes in seasonal forest communities due to soil moisture increase after damming.

Local changes caused by dams can have drastic consequences for ecosystems, not only because they change the water regime but also the modification on lakeshore areas. Thus, this work aimed to determine the changes in soil moisture after damming, to understand the consequences of this modification on the arboreal community of dry forests, some of the most endangered systems on the planet. We studied these changes in soil moisture and the arboreal community in three dry forests in the Araguari River Basin, after two dams construction in 2005 and 2006, and the potential effects on these forests.