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Amazon Rainforest Absorbing Less Carbon Than Expected2 min read

by Christina Procopiou on August 20, 2019

Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division

Rainforest in Manaus, Brazil. By Jeff Chambers

Agriculture, forestry, and other types of land use account for 23% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, yet at the same time natural land processes absorb the equivalent of almost a third of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry, according to the International Panel on Climate Change, which issued the first-ever comprehensive report on land and climate interactions earlier this month. How long will the Amazon rainforest continue to act as an effective carbon sink?

An international team of scientists, including climate scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), investigated this question and found that accounting for phosphorus-deficient soils reduced projected carbon dioxide uptake by an average of 50% in the Amazon, compared to current estimates based on previous climate models that did not take into account phosphorus deficiency. The Amazon Basin is critical to helping mitigate climate change due to the Amazon rainforest absorbing a quarter of the total amount of CO2 absorbed by all forests globally.

The paper, “Amazon forest response to CO2 fertilization dependent on plant phosphorus acquisition,” was published August 5 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“Most predictions of the Amazon rainforest’s ability to resist climate change are based on models that have outdated assumptions; one of those is that a sufficient supply of nutrients such as phosphorus exist in soils to enable trees to take in additional CO2 as global emissions increase,” said Berkeley Lab research scientist and study co-author Jennifer Holm. “But in reality the ecosystem is millions of years old, highly weathered, and therefore depleted of phosphorus in many parts of the Amazon.

Researchers involved in the AmazonFACE project monitored tree growth and leaf development aboveground, and tracked root growth and activity within soils belowground at a study site north of Manaus, Brazil where ambient CO2 concentration is planned to be artificially elevated to enable a realistic investigation of how future CO2 concentrations will affect the ecosystem.

“Our improved models now take into account these complexities, and could serve to help paint a more realistic portrayal of how the Amazon, and the tropics in general, will be impacted by climate change and the ability of trees to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere,” Holm said.

The lead author of the study was Katrin Fleischer of the Technical University of Munich (their release here). Holm was supported by DOE’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE)-Tropics, and Berkeley Lab co-author Qing Zhu was supported by DOE’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project.

News & Events

EGD Postdoc Fellow Receives Young Researcher Presenter Award1 min read

January 21, 2021

Pramod Bhuvankar, an EGD postdoctoral fellow working with research scientist Abdullah Cihan, received a Young Researcher Presenter Award during the 2020 Computational Methods in Water Resources conference in December. His presentation, “Pore-scale simulations of permeability decline in porous media due to fines migration,” described a pore-scale CFD study of clay mobilization in porous media due…

Berkeley Lab Partners with International Collaborators in Geothermal Energy Research1 min read

January 20, 2021

  Scientists from the Energy Geosciences Division have begun working with European partners on three new geothermal research projects through the Department of Energy’s membership in GEOTHERMICA, a transnational consortium that combines the in-country financial resources and research expertise of 15 participating countries to demonstrate and validate novel concepts in geothermal energy use. This marks the…

EESA Senior Scientist Talks Earthquake Building Resilience1 min read

Berkeley Lab senior scientist David McCallen leads a subproject called Earthquake Sim, or EQSIM, for the DOE’s Energy Exascale Computing Project. He is also professor and director of the Center for Civil Engineering Earthquake Research in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. McCallen recently spoke with Scott Gibson of…

EESA Scientist Coauthors New Comprehensive Guide on Removing CO2 from the Atmosphere2 min read

January 18, 2021

Berkeley Lab researchers are working on ways to sequester more carbon in soil, including through agricultural practices. (Credit: Berkeley Lab) Scientists say that any serious plan to address climate change should include carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and policies, which makes the newly launched CDR Primer an especially vital resource, says Berkeley Lab scientist Margaret Torn, one…

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