Wildfires are becoming the new normal across Amazonia. Deforestation is transforming the region at a rate of around 10,000 square km/year (half the area of Wales), and now the area degraded annually -forest logged and burned but not cut down-is greater than the area deforested. Fire has historically been rare in Amazonia, meaning that the forests are not adapted to fire and the trees often die from fires - releasing carbon (C) back to the atmosphere and amplifying global climate change. Burning of tropical forests is already releasing more climate-warming carbon dioxide than fossil fuel burning in the whole of Europe. Trees in Amazonia contain around 7x more C than humans are releasing every year, and soils contain the same amount again, so it is vital to understand what is happening to this C and minimize emissions. As vegetation sheds its leaves, branches, and roots, or dies, some of the C released remains in the soil, and some is later decomposed and released back to the atmosphere. Carbon exists in the soil in many different forms, from new inputs from decomposing plant material to ancient C formed over millennia. Burning adds pyrogenic carbon (PyC) to the soil, a partially burnt form of C that is resistant to decomposition and could make the soil more fertile. Because soil C takes a long time to form, its conservation is particularly important. Despite the widespread increase in fire in Amazonia, there have been few measurements of soil C fractions and dynamics in burned areas - most have focussed on natural forests. Burned forests will have different composition, forest structure, and C dynamics. Understanding how different soil C fractions are formed and lost is crucial to understand how fire and climate change affect C storage. We propose to make major advances in understanding fire impacts, including the processes that affect the type and quantifies of soil C formed, and how C gains/losses vary over time, with soil type, and climate. We will combine new measurements with innovative modelling to inform land management strategies and C budgets. We have already collected data from across Amazonia in intact forests that have not recently burned. Crucially our project will collect a new, comprehensive dataset from human-modified forests, including logged, burned and abandoned land. We will use an approach known as a chronosequence, where we take samples at sites that were burnt at different times in the past, so we can see how the soil C has changed after e.g. 1 year, 2 years, or up to 20 years after a fire. This will then be used to develop a state-of-the-art land surface model, JULES, which forms part of the UK Earth System Model. At our sample sites, we will evaluate how different burn severities affect soil C, both in surface and deep soils, and how these change over time post-burning and with soil, climate, and land-use such as logging. At 3 focal sites, we will take detailed measurements of the decomposition rate of the C over 4 years, comparing measurements with different land-use, burn severity and wet vs dry seasons. Knowing what forms C takes after a fire and how fast it decomposes under different conditions will enable us to build these processes into the JULES model. We will model PyC globally for the first time and make projections of land C changes in Amazonia over the next ~40-60 years under different management practices. As well as transforming scientific understanding of post-fire soil C and its resilience to climate and management, our project will inform socio-environmental planning for sustainable resource use to conserve soil C. We will work with regional partners, fire managers, state and national policymakers to integrate our findings into decision-making to minimise negative fire impacts. Due to the Amazon Basin-scale of our work, these strategies are a crucial step to limit the risk of large-scale loss of soil C.

Ocean circulation is driven by water masses with different densities. Much of this is generated at the ocean-continent boundary where near landlocked seas have a restricted connection with the global ocean, allowing them to evolve a different temperature or salinity. These marginal basins often form when continental plates coalesce - the Mediterranean today is a good example of this - or disaggregate - the opening of the South Atlantic around 100 million years as Gondwana broke apart is another. The evolution of these marine gateways therefore has a profound impact on the patterns of ocean circulation and its vigour. Changing palaeogeography is known to play a key role in major climate reorganisations such as the transition from greenhouse to icehouse conditions, and marine gateways are therefore the focus of several upcoming international scientific drilling projects. When marine gateways allow only very limited exchange, large volumes of evaporites may precipitate in the marginal seas. These salt giants, which are not forming in the world today can be sufficiently large to change the salinity of the global ocean. The most recent salt giant formed around 5 million years ago in the Mediterranean. Using isotopes that respond to the different proportions of ocean and river water feeding the marginal basin, integrated with box modelling and global climate simulations, it has been possible to reconstruct and quantify Mediterranean-Atlantic exchange and show that the major climate impact of this gateway evolution precedes evaporite precipitation by several million years. In this project we propose to develop and apply these techniques to the older and larger South Atlantic salt giant where there is still controversy over the location and timing of gateway evolution and hence the climatic impact of opening the South Atlantic. To do this we are extending an existing collaboration between Bristol and Utrecht where researchers have led much of the Atlantic-Mediterranean gateway research, to include researchers at the University of Sao Paulo who have essential expertise in the palaeogeography and chronology of the South Atlantic salt-bearing successions. This is therefore a joint NERC-FAPESP global partnership seedcorn application. Over two years we propose to undertake fieldwork in Brazil led by the University of Sao Paulo, pilot isotope analyses and GCM analysis of existing global climate simulations at the University of Bristol, in parallel with box-modelling at Utrecht University. An early meeting in Bristol to review the initial pilot data will be followed by a mid-project model-data integration workshop in Sao Paulo. The workshop will be open to the wider research community in South America and we will particularly encourage the involvement of Early Stage Researchers. In addition, we will support Sao Paulo PhD students to apply for internship scholarships (FAPESP-BEPE) in order to be actively involved in the project. The last phase of this project will draw in researchers involved in marine gateway research associated with current scientific drilling projects, three of which are led by UK scientists. The final meeting in Bristol will be a forum both for presenting the scientific results of the project and for initiating an EU COST-Action application to support on-going community-building and collaborative research activities. This is designed to support and expand the scientific community engaged with long-term scientific drilling projects focused on marine gateways.

Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledges is a 3.5 year research project bringing together UK and São Paulo based academics and producers of the built environment to study and raise awareness of building production, and to foster, responsible and just alternatives to the worsening and increasingly dispersed conditions of contemporary building construction across the globe. Working together with affiliated researchers and partner organisations from professional and informal building sectors, and resisting the separation of design from construction, the project consolidates and makes available resources and research methodologies for the new interdisciplinary, cross-cultural field of Production Studies. To do so it mobilises and makes available for the first time in English translation key works from the foremost enquiry into design, labour and the construction site by the still-active architectural historian and theorist Sérgio Ferro, whose work remains little known outside the Brazilian and French contexts where it was developed, despite its pertinence to the urgent crisis in building today. Drawing on disciplines from political economy, sociology, philosophy to history of art, architecture and construction, Ferro's framework both provides a common critical, theoretical and methodological ground for Production Studies, and directs it towards social action, as already demonstrated by his important influence on architects working in Brazil today to technically advise grassroots movements and communities in self-managed building production. A number of these groups (Usina, Arquitetura na Periferia, Peabiru) are directly involved in the project, which strengthens their sustainability through international exchange and shares their expertise of alternative construction processes with building cultures such as the UK where mainstream construction dominates. As a means to effect change the project will transform knowledge of design and building production through a series of activities with academics in the field of Production Studies, researchers and producers of the built environment, and with wider publics including: i) an annual programme of Production Studies symposia and exchanges in the UK (Newcastle, London) and in São Paulo state (São Paulo; São Carlos). ii) the co-production of 24 new case studies - that are aimed as exemplars to both address the gap in academic knowledge of production (histories of informal and formal production, related disciplinary approaches such as anthropology, political science) and to provide resources for further action and change (documenting the work of social movements and self-builders, recording and trialling alternative forms of design pedagogy that engage with production). iii) a range of activities such as local workshops, live build projects, professional development training, public talks, theatre, film screenings with architectural practitioners, building industry professionals and institutions, activists, design students and pedagogues, and the general public, in conjunction with project partners (such as, in São Paulo, IAB-SP (Institute of Brazilian Architects); UMM (Union of Housing Movements); Centro Gaspar Garcia, and in the UK, the RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects), The Building Centre, William Morris Gallery).

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.

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