Long-term carbon loss in fragmented Neotropical forests

Sandro Pütz (), Jürgen Groeneveld, Klaus Henle, Christoph Knogge, Alexandre Camargo Martensen, Markus Metz, Jean Paul Metzger, Milton Cezar Ribeiro, Mateus Dantas de Paula and Andreas Huth
Additional contact information
Sandro Pütz: UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
Jürgen Groeneveld: UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
Klaus Henle: UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
Christoph Knogge: UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
Alexandre Camargo Martensen: University of Toronto
Markus Metz: Fondazione Edmund Mach—Istituto Agrario di San Michele all’Adige
Jean Paul Metzger: Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão
Milton Cezar Ribeiro: Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão
Mateus Dantas de Paula: UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
Andreas Huth: UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Tropical forests play an important role in the global carbon cycle, as they store a large amount of carbon (C). Tropical forest deforestation has been identified as a major source of CO2 emissions, though biomass loss due to fragmentation—the creation of additional forest edges—has been largely overlooked as an additional CO2 source. Here, through the combination of remote sensing and knowledge on ecological processes, we present long-term carbon loss estimates due to fragmentation of Neotropical forests: within 10 years the Brazilian Atlantic Forest has lost 69 (±14) Tg C, and the Amazon 599 (±120) Tg C due to fragmentation alone. For all tropical forests, we estimate emissions up to 0.2 Pg C y−1 or 9 to 24% of the annual global C loss due to deforestation. In conclusion, tropical forest fragmentation increases carbon loss and should be accounted for when attempting to understand the role of vegetation in the global carbon balance.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6037 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms6037

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6037

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().