The international scientific community is developing a greater understanding of the underpinning science and the associated impacts of climate change on Amazonia. However, the challenge is now to continue to develop the science while at the same time engaging with the national and international stakeholders, the key policymakers and the local communities. We recognise that this cannot be achieved in isolation and the key to success will be through international collaboration. Therefore, this programme will be delivered through close collaboration between the University of Exeter, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the UK Met Office. The PULSE-Brazil project consists of three inter-linked Work-packages (WPs): Work-package 1 (WP1) - will coordinate the exchange of scientists between the UK and Brazil, organise and run international conferences and stakeholder engagement activities, and manage the overall PULSE-Brazil project. The ultimate aim of this WP is to integrate the results and discussions between the cross-disciplinary research team and policy makers to propose strategies for mitigation and adaptation (Leader: Luiz Aragao) Work-package 2 (WP2) - will focus on building the climate, environmental and human-health datasets for assessing the Impacts and Vulnerability to Climate Change in Brazil, based on state-of-the-art climate change projections from he regional Eta model and the MBSCG global model. The climate and environmental data will be delivered by INPE of Brazil, while the health data will be delivered by Federal University of Minas Gerais - both funded by a related proposal to FAPESP- FRPGCC (Leader : Jose Marengo). Work-package 3 (WP3) - will develop a 'user friendly' decision-support system (PULSE) that will allow both academic and non-academic users to visualise the impacts of Climate Change on ecosystems and human health the Brazilian region, using relevant outputs from pre-existing model projections. This will be subcontracted to the UK Met Office (Leader: Richard Betts).

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.

Tropical forests store more than a half of the world's forest carbon and produce over one third of the productivity of all terrestrial systems. They are also biodiversity hotspots, and host a large proportion of the world's terrestrial flora and fauna. However, growing evidence shows that the ability of tropical forests to perform important ecosystem services (i.e. carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation) has been dramatically reduced by multiple pressures associated with human-induced forest disturbances (e.g. agriculture, logging, fire and fragmentation) and extreme climate events. Of these disturbances, fire represents of the greatest threats. Rainforests have not co-evolved with fire, and species have not adapted to withstand fire or the changes it imposes on the forests. Yet today, ignition sources are common in most human-modified regions, as many local farmers living within tropical forests traditionally use fire as a management technique to prepare their land for planting. This is compounded by selective logging and fragmentation, which increase the flammability of the remaining forests. Critically, fires are much more likely to escape their target area and enter the surrounding forests during severe drought events. This is exactly what happened during the current 2015-16 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) - considered one of the three strongest events ever recorded. The prolonged dry season allowed thousands of fires to get out of control in Amazonian and SE Asian tropical rainforests. Specifically in the Brazilian Amazon, the end of 2015 was marked by over 87,000 fire events, a 48% increase in relation to 2014 (a non-ENSO year). As a result, the widespread wildfires affected half of our 20 permanent plots near the Santarém region in the state of Pará, while fortunately preserving the other ten plots unburned. The Sustainable Amazon Network (SAN) has established these plots along a gradient of forest modification in 2010, and since 2014 a joint project between UK and Brazilian scientists (ECOFOR) has been carrying out research in this region. Consequently, the work we are proposing here benefits from unique and detailed pre-fire information on carbon dynamics and plant functional traits (from ECOFOR) as well as the distribution of three distinct taxa (birds, dung beetles and plants) and secondary seed dispersal processes (from SAN). Uniquely our network of permanent plots is established along an existing gradient of forest modification before the 2015 fires, allowing us to undertake the first rigorous evaluation of fire effects across different forest disturbance classes. This ability to examine fire impacts using detailed pre-fire data allows us to develop three major avenues of research across a human-modified gradient of forest disturbances: (1) the impacts of very severe wildfires on plant communities and carbon dynamics, assessing therefore which plant functional traits may predict species mortality, survival and recruitment; (2) an investigation into the fire impacts on forest fauna (i.e. birds and dung beetles) and associated seed dispersal processes; and (3) the development of a detailed understanding of scale and impacts of the current extreme ENSO-event, exploring the relationship between remote sensing information and ground-based measures. The better linkages between remote-sensing products and actual measures of fire severity will allow us to scale up the carbon emission and biodiversity loss estimates across the whole region. The results fo AFIRE are critically important, as tropical forests around the world may be threatened by drier, hotter and longer dry seasons with climate change. Our findings will help inform mitigation strategies to manage the impacts of future ENSO-mediated droughts and severe wildfires on tropical forests. We also expect AFIRE plots to form the basis of much longer-term research on the impacts of tropical wildfire