Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas contributing to human-induced global warming. Atmospheric methane concentrations have increased sharply since 2007, and dramatically in 2014, for reasons that are not properly understood. The overall increase since 2007 is comparable to the largest growth events over the past 1000 years. The recent rises have occurred worldwide, but after an Arctic pulse in 2007, the growth has been primarily in the tropics and southern hemisphere. Strong growth continues in 2015. Carbon isotopic evidence suggests that the increase is due to sources that are predominantly biogenic in origin, with changes in the anthropogenic sources from fossil carbon and burning (e.g., natural gas leakage, coal mining and so on) playing a subordinate role. This, taken with the tropical locus on growth, suggests that the increase has primarily been driven by meteorological change (e.g., temperature, rainfall). Moreover, the global methane budget is currently not well understood. "Bottom-up" estimates, made by aggregating inventories of emissions (e.g. from gas leaks, fires, landfills, cows, etc) or from process models (e.g., wetlands) balanced with known loss processes, are significantly different from '"top-down" budgets assessed by direct measurement of methane in the atmosphere. Why this discrepancy occurs is not known. The project has four components: 1. Better Observations are needed to derive estimates of emissions. The project will support a UK observation network for methane and its isotopes. Continuous stations will be at Kjolnes (Norway), Weybourne, Jersey, NERC ship RRS JC Ross, Cape Verde, Ascension, Falklands, Halley Bay, Hong Kong, with associated stations in Canada, Spitsbergen, Bolivia, South Africa, India, Rwanda and Malaysia. Flask or bag sampling (for methane, 13C and D/H isotopes) will also be undertaken at these stations and at a number of continental stations in S. America, Africa and S, SE and E Asia, with offline analysis in the UK. A D/H measurement facility will be set up. The UK FAAM aircraft will carry out flights across the Atlantic tropics, from Azores to Cape Verde to Ascension. 2. Process Studies will address the largest information gaps in the global budget. Tropical emission fluxes and isotopic signatures are not well constrained. Field campaigns will be undertaken in tropical wetlands in Amazonia, Africa, India and SE Asia, and C4 savanna biomass burn regions. Poorly understood anthropogenic sources will be studied in Kuwait and S., S.E. and E. Asia. Characteristic isotopic signatures of regional emissions will be determined, to support global and regional modelling. Land surface modelling and satellite studies will study emissions and responses to change in temperature and precipitation. Major sink processes will be investigated in the tropical atmosphere, with vertically and latitudinally resolved OH and Cl budget studies by the FAAM aircraft, and quantification of tropical uptake by soils. 3. Atmospheric modelling will be used to derive regional and global fluxes, apportioned by source type and geography using integrated in situ and remote sensing observing systems. We will carry out regional trajectory studies using models like NAME to assess regional emissions. Global modelling using 3D models will test synthetic estimates of the methane mole fraction and isotopic record. Global inverse modelling for mole fraction, 13C and D/H will be used to estimate fluxes by geographic source and source type, including a comprehensive assessment of the uncertainties that remain once all available observations have been used. 4. Integrative studies will use the results from the project to test top-down and bottom-up emission estimates, and evaluate the responses of the global methane budget to projections of climate change. The project will deliver a state of the art greenhouse gas monitoring network and much better knowledge of the global methane budget.

Around the world, seasonally dry tropical forests have in the past been disregarded as marginal wastelands but are now recognised for the importance of their biodiversity and potential ecosystem services. They face critical challenges of conservation, unsustainable use leading to desertification, local poverty and migration to urban areas. In Brazil, 11% of its land area is this type of forest, called the Caatinga. There is an urgent need to provide methods by which this fragile biome can be monitored and protected, for the plants, animals and people who live there. The aim of this project is to develop a tool that can provide a new level, quality and accessibility of information for 1) biodiversity monitoring at species level and 2) an assessment of ecosystem quality, with resulting implications for land use. Quantitative maps generated by this novel technology can be used to optimise resources and underpin policy and forest management methods. This project will generate technological innovation by integrating high resolution remote sensing (hyperspectral imaging from drones using Rutherford Appleton Laboratory camera systems) with ground-based measurement on the ground (including plant spectral profiles and LIDAR). One way in which it will be tested will be examination of effects of various levels of cattle grazing upon the forest, as a widespread human/environment interaction. To achieve its aims, the project team is interdisciplinary and international, with research partners from the UK and Brazil. The project will also involve Brazilian stakeholders from federal and state level ministries, agencies and advisory groups, as well as NGOs and other groups responsible for communities and for policymaking. By seeking their specific needs for affordable, practical technology at the start of the project, and by facilitating their planning for uptake of the technology by the end of the project, the project will seek to maximise its impact in Brazil. The technology will also have broader relevance to other seasonal dry forests and indeed other threatened, inaccessible ecosystems around the globe. Thus, through the technological innovation and deliberate engagement of stakeholders, the project will address the UN Sustainable Development Goal 15: 'Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss'.

Biomass burning aerosol (BBA) exerts a considerable impact on regional radiation budgets as it significantly perturbs the surface fluxes and atmospheric heating rates and its cloud nucleating (CCN) properties perturb cloud microphysics and hence affect cloud radiative properties, precipitation and cloud lifetime. It is likely that such large influences on heating rates and CCN will affect regional weather predictions in addition to climatic changes. It is increasingly recognised that biomass burning affects the biosphere but the magnitude of the effects need to quantified. However, BBA is a complex and poorly understood aerosol species because of the mixing of the black carbon with organic and inorganic species. Furthermore, emission rates are poorly quantified and difficult to represent in models. It is now timely to address these challenges as both measurement methods and model capabilities have developed rapidly over the last few years and are now sufficiently advanced that the processes and properties of BBA can be sufficiently constrained by measurements; these can be used to challenge the new aerosol schemes used in numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate models. Amazonia is one of the most important biomass burning regions in the world, being significantly impacted by intense biomass burning during the dry season leading to highly turbid conditions, and is therefore a key environment for quantifying these processes and determining the influence of these interactions on the weather and climate of the region. Though previous large scale studies of BBA over Amazonia and its radiative impacts have been performed, these are now over a decade old and considerable scientific progress can be made towards addressing all of the above questions given the rapid advance of models and measurements in recent years. We are therefore proposing a major consortium programme, SAMBBA, a consortium of 7 university partners and the UK Met Office, which will deliver a suite of ground, aircraft and satellite measurements of Amazonian BBA and use this data to 1) improve our knowledge of BB emissions; 2) challenge and improve the latest aerosol process models; 3) challenge and improve satellite retrievals; 4) test predictions of aerosol influences on regional climate and weather over Amazonia and the surrounding regions made using the next generation of climate and NWP models with extensive prognostic aerosol schemes; and 5) assess the impact of .biomass burning on the Amazonian biosphere. The main field experiment will take place during September 2012 and is based in Porto Velho, Brazil. At this time of year, widespread burning takes place across the region leading to highly turbid conditions. The UK large research aircraft (FAAM) will be used to sample aerosol chemical, physical and optical properties and gas phase precursor concentrations. Measurements of radiation will also be made using advanced radiometers on board the aircraft and satellite data will also be utilised. The influences of biomass burning aerosols are highly significant at local, weather, seasonal, and climate temporal scales necessitating the use of a hierarchy of models to establish and test key processes and quantify impacts. We will challenge models carrying detailed process descriptions of biomass burning aerosols with the new, comprehensive observations being made during SAMBBA to evaluate model performance and to improve parameterisations. Numerical Weather Prediction and Climate model simulations with a range of complexity and spatial resolution will be used to investigate the ways in which absorbing aerosol may influence dynamics and climate on regional and wider scales. At the heart of the approach is the use of a new range of models that can investigate such interactions using coupled descriptions of aerosols and clouds to fully investigate feedbacks at spatial scales that are sufficiently well resolved to assess such processes.

This proposal spans the three largest biomes in Brazil, the Atlantic and Amazon Forests, and Cerrado savanna. Together these cover >85% of Brazil's territory and include many of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth, but all have seen large losses in extent. While the value of their vegetation is increasingly recognized it is unclear to what extent these systems can regenerate or resist the increasing environmental stressors associated with climate change, particularly heating & drying. The motivation of BIO-RED is to understand how these changes affect the ability of intact & regenerating ecosystems to deliver societal benefits. This requires addressing these key questions: (i) How resilient are old-growth & regenerating ecosystems to the key stressors expected from future environmental changes? (ii) Is the destruction a reversible process on time-scales relevant to human society? Thus, will vegetation recover to a similar state as the original and provide similar services? (iii) Will the increasingly hot climate affect the recovery of forests and will modified forests be more vulnerable to future environmental change than intact forests? Answering these questions is only possible with a sound understanding how these systems function and what their sensitivities are. To respond to this need, BIO-RED will apply a multi-scale approach to evaluate the relationships between functions, biodiversity, resilience and regeneration potential in Brazil's three largest biomes in the face of deforestation and climate change threats. Our objectives are to: (i) Determine the biome-wide relationships between target ecosystem functions and biodiversity based on data from the RAINFOR and associated vegetation census networks; (ii) Obtain a detailed mechanistic understanding of the link between biogeochemical cycling, plant nutrient use and species composition and diversity in primary and regenerating systems at the local scale in 3 study landscapes; (iii) Examine tree species' ecophysiological sensitivities to key climate-linked stressors - drought, heat & fire - via real-time monitoring of vegetation functioning and comprehensive trait assessments; (iv) Develop and apply a UAV ("drone")-based imaging spectroscopy platform to map canopy chemistry and functional diversity at tree, plot & landscape scales, and explore the relationships between ecosystem properties & functional diversity; (v) Establish the extent to which biome transitions are already occurring, including forest invasion into cerrado, using both permanent plots and satellite-based monitoring. (vi) Determine the ability of recovering ecosystems and ecosystem management to protect biodiversity & provide key ecosystem services in Brazilian biomes; BIO-RED builds on existing observational networks all led by PIs of this proposal: RAINFOR, GEM, ForestPlots.net (>500 old-growth forest plots), ECOFOR & BIOTA, and others contributed by Brazilian project partners. Most activities will be focused on 3 focal-landscapes, in W Pará (Amazon forest), E Mato Grosso (cerrado), & E São Paulo (Atlantic forest), each with a complex mosaic of old-growth & regenerating systems that is already well sampled by our plot infrastructure and so ideal for intensive work to probe processes & to scale-up via hyperspectral imaging. BIO-RED will improve understanding of the extent to which Brazilian forest & savanna are resisting climate extremes, the extent to which destruction is reversible, & the vulnerabilities of intact & modified vegetation to climate extremes. It will identify the factors that control resilience & recovery of biodiversity & provision of key ecosystem services to people. These will be used to inform ecosystem management & policy options such as REDD+, the Brazilian Forest Code, & Brazilian ecosystem recovery plans. We therefore expect to lay a stronger scientific basis for future regeneration & protection of these systems, and so to improve benefits for human society.

The importance of the greenhouse gases CO2 and CH4 for climate is well established. There is broad scientific consensus that human activities are the main driver for increasing concentrations of these greenhouse gases (GHGs), particularly over the past century. Based on accurate surface measurements we know that approximately 45% of the CO2 emitted by human activities remain in the atmosphere. The net balance is apparently being taken up by global oceans, terrestrial vegetation and soils. However, there are substantial uncertainties associated with the nature, location and strength of these natural components of the carbon cycle. The Amazon region is one of the largest forested regions in the world, representing the largest reservoir of above ground organic carbon. Amazonia is not only subject to changes in climate but also to rapid environmental change due to fast population growth and economic development causing extensive deforestation and urbanisation. Such external drivers can lead to further shifts in the carbon balance resulting in release of carbon stored in the biomass and soil to the atmosphere, with implications for accelerating the growth of atmospheric GHG concentrations and climate change. Despite its important role for the global carbon cycle, current understanding of the Amazonian, and more broadly the tropical, carbon cycle is poorly constrained by observations. These knowledge gaps result in large uncertainties in the fate of the Amazonian carbon budget under a warming climate, and consequently hamper any predictive skill of carbon-climate models. Since 2009, the Amazon region has been the focus of major UK and Brazilian research projects that aim at improving our knowledge of the Amazonian carbon cycle using detailed, but localized aircraft observations of CO2 and CH4 at a number of sites. These measurements are a great advance but they remain highly localized in space and time. Space-borne measurements have the ability to fill these observational gaps by providing observations with dense spatial and temporal coverage in regions poorly sampled by surface networks. It is essential, however, that such space-based observations are properly tied to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reference standard to ensure acceptance of space-based datasets by the carbon cycle community and to prevent misleading results on regional carbon budgets. The central aim of this proposal is to link the in-situ measurements with remotely sensed satellite data to establish an integrated Amazonian Carbon Observatory where satellite data complements the in situ data by filling the gaps between the in situ sites and by extending the coverage over the whole Amazon region. Satellite observations of GHGs are now available from a dedicated instrument on board the Japanese GOSAT satellite and results look very promising. However, satellite retrievals over the Amazon (and the Tropics) are intrinsically difficult and the accuracy of such GHG retrievals has not been established for this region which is a major obstacle for the exploitation of space-based data to constrain carbon fluxes over the Amazon. We propose to establish a network of Brazilian and UK researchers to bridge the gap between in-situ and remote sensing observations and communities and to evaluate the feasibility of remote sensing of GHG concentrations for the purpose of GHG flux monitoring over Amazonia to improve our understanding of the Amazonian carbon cycle and to increase our ability for observing tropical carbon fluxes. The proposed network will bring together world-class expertise to address highly relevant and timely scientific questions that will advance our understanding of the carbon cycle of the Amazon. It will strongly strengthen and expand UK and Brazilian relationships and it will help further strengthen the leading role of UK researchers in many areas relevant to this proposal.