Amazonian
forests play an important and complex role in the global carbon cycle,
contributing substantially to increases (via land use change emissions) and
possibly to net sequestration (in intact forests) of atmospheric CO2.
Predicting these processes of net carbon uptake and release depends crucially
on understanding ecosystem response to both seasonal and interannual
variations. However, prominent ecosystem modeling studies of the Amazonian
carbon cycle [Tian et al., 1998; Botta 2002] appear to make seasonal
predictions (wet-season carbon uptake and dry-season loss) at odds with both
some site-specific observations (which show the opposite pattern, Saleska et al., [2003]) and basin-wide
satellite observations (which imply large-scale increases in the activity of
photosynthetic vegetation during the dry season, Huete et al., [2005]).
Author: S. R. Saleska, M. Pathmadevan, A. Huete, F. Cardoso, et al (saleska at email dot arizona dot edu)
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