Searching the Amazon for Climate Change Clues - Earth and Environmental Sciences Area

Source: Bay Area News Group & Dan Hawkes

Kolby Jardine works with colleagues to characterize specific volatile organic compounds emitted from leaves, flowers, and fruits in a hybrid African-American oil palm plantation near Belem, Brazil. (Courtesy Kolby Jardine)

An article written by Jeremy Thomas for the Bay Area News Group (which includes the San Jose Mercury News and Oakland Tribune) recently reported on the work being done as part of DOE’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment. By peering deeply into the Amazon, which has experienced two “megadroughts” in the past decade, scientists may be able to better predict the impact of climate change globally, and also collect clues about how California’s vegetation might be affected by drought in the coming years, such as if and when trees might start dying off en masse.

Using mass spectrometers and other sensors from 150-foot towers high above the forest canopy, Berkeley Lab-EES scientists Kolby Jardine, Jeff Chambers, Lara Kueppers, and other U.S. researchers, along with a group of Brazilian scientists, are measuring emissions from the Amazon forest. Plants emit smells (compounds) that can prevent stress, protect the canopy from extreme heat, and also play an important role in cloud formation and precipitation.

and the Contra Costa Times: http://www.contracostatimes.com/bay-area-news/ci_28316910/berkeley-lab-scientists-search-amazon-clues-impacts-climate

LBNL TABL: http://today.lbl.gov/2015/06/23/searching-amazon-forest-for-clues-to-climate-change-drought/

News & Events

Study Sheds Light on Microbial Communities in Earth’s Subsurface2 min read

August 16, 2023

From the tops of tree canopies to the bottom of groundwater reservoirs, a vast amount of living organisms interact with nonliving components such as rock, water, and soil to shape this area of Earth known as the “critical zone.” Over half of Earth’s microbes are located in the subsurface critical zone, which ranges from…

Carl Steefel Honored in Goldschmidt Session on Reactive Transport2 min read

August 2, 2023

The contributions of Carl Steefel to the reactive transport modeling scientific community were recognized in a session held in his honor at the recent Goldschmidt 2023 conference (Lyon, France). Goldschmidt is the foremost annual, international conference on geochemistry and related subjects, organized by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. The session was…

DOE Funds Projects to Advance Forest Carbon Dioxide Removal Efforts and Agricultural Soil Carbon Conservation4 min read

August 1, 2023

The DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) recently announced $5 million in funding for four projects–two from Berkeley Lab with EESA leadership. The projects selected offer “promising solutions” to the nation’s climate change challenges by helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and will “accelerate their deployment…

Quantifying the strength of the land carbon sink3 min read

July 26, 2023

This article first appeared at nature.berkeley.edu/news. The world’s forests, grasslands, and other terrestrial ecosystems have played a substantial role in offsetting human carbon emissions—a capability that UC Berkeley researchers say would be threatened by continued global change. The assessment, published today as a new review paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, presents a comprehensive analysis of…