This proposal aims to meet the urgent need to extend monitoring of biodiversity, carbon stock, carbon balance, tree growth, and tree mortality in Latin America beyond rain forests and into dry biomes. Most concerns about biodiversity and ecosystem function in the tropics focus on rain forests, but this neglects the fact that 50% of the lowland tropics globally is climatically seasonal, with a natural vegetation of dry forest or savanna. In South America in particular, the rain forests of Amazonia monopolise research and conservation, but dry forests and woody savannas can house equal numbers of plant species, many of which are endemic. We need to understand far better how these dry biomes contribute to global biogeochemical cycles and how their unique species react to environmental changes. In particular, little is known about how dry forests will respond to climate change. Initiatives such as RAINFOR have been highly successful in connecting a large network of scientists who have established permanent inventory plots in Neotropical rain forests. Collectively, hundreds of plots distributed across Amazonia have been central to describing patterns of biodiversity across the basin, and how the forest participates in global biogeochemical cycles. No corresponding network connecting a large number of plots over broad geographic scales exists in Brazil or more widely in the Neotropics for dry biomes. This project aims to start a process of connecting researchers who have established dozens of inventory plots in these biomes. We propose to: 1. Re-census, using methodologies agreed by the RAINFOR network, 10 permanent 0.2Ha plots in tropical dry forest in Rio de Janeiro state for carbon stock, above ground biomass (C) gain, tree growth, tree mortality, and biodiversity. 2. Contribute data for five existing 1 Ha plots in dry forests and neighbouring forest biomes in Rio de Janeiro state and c. 100 dry forest plots from elsewhere in Brazil to the ForestPlots.net database, thereby making it available to the global research community. We will prioritise dry forests, but we also have plot-based data from the Mata Atlântica rain forests (not covered by RAINFOR), and from the tree-savanna biome of the cerrado in Central Brazil, and we hope additionally to start a process of adding this information to ForestPlots.net. 3. Convene a workshop to bring together key workers from RJ and across Brazil who have established inventory plots in dry biomes to encourage them to join a new network that can take forward dry forest monitoring at a continental scale. This workshop will be held in the Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense (UENF), Campos dos Goytacazes, RJ, Brazil. This workshop will be preceded by a two day training course in phylogenetics and phylogenetic diversity delivered by Dexter and Pennington at the Escola de Botânica in Rio, and will be followed a course for the same student pool on ecological niche modelling taught by Antje Ahrends (Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh). In addition, training will be provided to Brazilian co-Is in the UK to build capacity to make some simple growth, leaf area and respiration measurements, led by Meir and Grace, with plot curation and analysis training using the ForestPlots.net facility, led by Gabriela Lopez in Leeds. 4. Compare phylogenetic diversity between dry forests and neighbouring rain forests in RJ to determine if these dry forests house unique lineage diversity, thereby adding a further argument for their conservation (7). Additionally, we will examine the impact of landscape history and fragmentation on phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic community structure in these dry forests. 5. We will develop a database of key functional traits, environmental parameters and principal carbon stocks and fluxes, and of the structure, floristics and phylogeny of Atlantic tropical semi-deciduous seasonal forest.

Despite an 82% decline in deforestation rates in Amazonia, fires are still on the rise. 2010 has been a year of severe drought and fire in Amazonia. Over the last months (July and August) the number of fire counts has reached 80% of the 2005 values, which was characterized as the drought of the century. Through the beginning of September, fire outbreaks have intensified in southwest Amazonia, including Brazil, Peru and Bolivia. This drought has been associated with warmer than average sea surface temperature in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean, in a scenario similar to the 2005 event. Amazon river levels near Iquitos and the Rio Negro near Manaus reached their lowest levels in the last 40 years and since the records began, respectively. This drought is perhaps the strongest ever recorded in this region. Droughts of this magnitude currently occur with a low frequency; however, their intensity and frequency are likely to increase in the 21st century, increasing the risk of severe wildfires in this fire-sensitive system. Understanding the impacts of forest fires on the carbon stocks and ecophysiology following the 2010 drought event is critical because these events may be common in the future climate of Amazonia. Moreover, we are still unable to predict the occurrence and extent of these droughts, we poorly understand how they affect forest fire patterns and how these fires impact the functioning of Amazonian forests. We therefore aim to quantify the impacts of drought-mediated fires on forest carbon stocks and functioning by investigating both the extent of the 2010 drought, and its influence on forest fires. In this project we will use this drought as a proxy for future climatic conditions in the region, which is likely to increase the probability of understorey forest fires. The Amazon is the largest tropical forest and most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet, storing around 86 billion tons of carbon in its biomass (currently similar to 10-years of fossil fuel emissions). Historically, fires in Amazonia have been reported to be rare, and it is unlikely that this biome is adapted to frequent fires. The increased trend in fire outbreaks in the last decades, associated to human activities, poses a growing risk to the stability of carbon stocks, functioning and diversity of Amazonian forests. Studying the effects of drought-induced fires on closed-canopy tropical forests can provide valuable insights regarding the responses of this ecosystem to future changes in the climate and environment. With our South American and American partners, this team is uniquely positioned to evaluate the effects of forest fires in Amazonia. This proposal brings together a multi-disciplinary group of local ecologists (which are currently tracking this drought on-the-ground), fire ecologists, climatologists as well as forest carbon and remote sensing experts in order to provide an integrative analysis of the climatology of this drought, the extent of forest fires and the carbon losses associated with this event. Working as a team, we will measure the different facets of this drought in multiple scales to provide a comprehensive assessment of its impacts. We will initially quantify the spatial extent of the drought and associated forest fires based on a combination of climate and remote sensing data. The team will then implement an extensive field survey to quantify the impacts of fires on carbon stocks and the functioning of the fire-affected forests. Finally, we will generate the first basin-wide map of the 2010 drought-induced fire impact on the Amazonian carbon stocks by integrating the previous data. Due to our close interaction with local governments and communities, we anticipate that this project will not only provide scientific information to help understand and diagnose the impacts of future events, but will also provide support for the development of public policies in order to mitigate climate change impacts in this region.

The ecosystems of the dry tropics are in flux: the savannas, woodlands and dry forests that together cover a greater area of the globe than rainforests are both a source of carbon emissions due to deforestation and forest degradation, and also a sink due to the enhanced growth of trees. However, both of these processes are poorly understood, in terms of their magnitude and causes, and the net carbon balance and its future remain unclear. This gap in knowledge arises because we do not have a systematic network of observations of vegetation change in the dry tropics, and thus have not, until now, been able to use observations of how things are changing to understand the processes involved and to test key theories. Satellite remote sensing, combined with ground measurements, offers the ideal way to overcome these challenges, as it can provide regular, consistent monitoring at relatively low cost. However, most ecosystems in the dry tropics, especially savannas, comprise a mixture of grass and trees, and many optical remote sensing approaches (akin to enhanced versions of the sensors on digital cameras) struggle to distinguish changes between the two. Long wavelength radar remote sensing avoids this problem as it is insensitive to the presence of leaves or grass, and also is not affected by clouds, smoke or the angle of the sun, all of which complicate optical remote sensing. Radar remote sensing is therefore ideal to monitor tree biomass in the dry tropics. We have successfully demonstrated that such data can be used to accurately map woody biomass change for all 5 million sq km of southern Africa. In SECO we will create a network of over 600 field plots to understand how the vegetation of the dry tropics is changing. and complement this with radar remote sensing to quantify how the carbon cycle of the dry tropics has changed over the last 15 years. This will provide the first estimates of key carbon fluxes across all of the dry tropics, including the amount of carbon being released by forest degradation and deforestation and how much carbon is being taken up by the intact vegetation in the region. By understanding where these processes are happening, we will improve our knowledge of the processes involved. W will use these new data to improve the way we model the carbon cycle of the dry tropics, and test key theories. The improved understanding, formalised into a model, will be used to examine how the dry tropics will respond to climate change, land use change and the effects of increasing atmospheric CO2. We will then be able to understand whether the vegetation of the dry tropics will mitigate or exacerbate climate change, and we will learn what we need to do to maintain the structure of the dry tropics and preserve its biodiversity. Overall, SECO will allow us to understand how the vegetation of the dry tropics is changing, and the implications of this for the global carbon cycle, the ecology of savannas and dry forests, and efforts to reduce climate change. The data we create, and the analyses we conduct will be useful to other researchers developing methods to monitor vegetation from satellites, and also to those who model the response of different ecosystems to climate and other changes. Forest managers, ecologists and development practitioners can use the data to understand which parts of the world's savannas and dry forests are changing most, and how these changes might be managed to avoid negative impacts that threaten biodiversity and the livelihoods of the 1 billion, mostly poor, rural people who live in this region.