Ecobreves – BRAZIL : Study Reveal Limits of Amazon Basin’s Resilience

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 6 2012 (IPS) - The Amazon basin shows signs of a transition to a "disturbance-dominated regime", including changing energy and water cycles, concluded the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), a research initiative carried out over the course of 20 years. Coordinated by Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research, the LBA determined that the Amazon basin biome has a high degree of resilience, but this resilience has limits.

"We managed to identify these limits and the consequences of exceeding them," Paulo Artaxo, one of the coordinators of the research program, told Tierramérica.

"Interactions between deforestation, fire and drought potentially lead to losses of carbon storage and changes in regional precipitation patterns and river discharge. The LBA revealed some of these mechanisms," he added.

The LBA initiative produced more than 2,000 publications and some 300 theses, and was the subject of an in-depth article published in January in Nature magazine, one of the world’s oldest scientific publications.