During the 2023–2024 El Niño – the most severe drought ever recorded in the Amazon basin – tree emissions of sesquiterpenes surged. Unexpected emissions of sesquiterpene alcohols in the wet season after the drought, suggesting the forest’s stress-defense metabolism stays active long after the immediate stress has passed.
The CloudRoots project asks a simple but powerful question: How does the Amazon rainforest interact with its own clouds? CloudRoots explores this two-way dialogue between forest and atmosphere across scales ranging from tiny leaf pores to clouds several kilometers above the Amazon. The team published the results from their research in several papers.
Débora Pinheiro-Oliveira and her colleagues investigated how forest diversity and environmental conditions shape the fluxes of BVOCs and methane in the soil–litter layer. They found that forest diversity and environmental conditions create a mosaic of gas exchange processes across the region.
A hidden mechanism continuously forms new aerosol particles from gaseous precursors in the Amazon rainforest, challenging previous assumptions about the sources of cloud condensation nuclei and their role in the hydrological cycle and climate.
A new study shows that drought stress reorganizes soil carbon sources in Amazon white-sand forest soils, increasing ecosystem stress and affecting carbon and nutrient cycles.
