Notícias

It is expected that sister lineages will be more similar to each other simply because they diverged more recently from a common ancestor. However, during evolution many other processes have been acting and driving to different extents of similarity among closely related lineages.  So, rather than being purely assumed, the tendency of sister lineages having more…

A recent drought completely shut down the Amazon Basin’s carbon sink, by killing trees and slowing their growth, a ground-breaking study led by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds has found.   Previous research has suggested that the Amazon –the most extensive tropical forest on Earth and one of the “green lungs” of…

A study in Ecography used information of the distribution and abundance of 2570 Amazon tree species across RAINFOR and ATDN plots to calculate the most favourable climate condition for each of them. Led by Adriane Esquivel Muelbert, a Brazilian PhD student at Leeds University, the team of 82 scientists discovered that most species are clearly restricted to…

In April, Gabriela Lopez-Gonzalez (ForestPlots.net / RAINFOR) co-ordinated the content and taught 2 workshops in Brazil in the management and analysis of tropical forest data. Attendees were taught how to use ForestPlots.net to load, analyse and manage information for long term monitoring plots, and share best practices in analysis and use of data. The first…

More than half of all tree species in the world’s most diverse forest – the Amazon – may be globally threatened, according to a new study. But the study, published in the journal Science Advances, also suggests that Amazonian parks, reserves and indigenous territories will protect most of the threatened species, if properly managed. The…

On 16 October, Tim Baker signed a cooperation agreement on behalf of RAINFOR (Amazon Forestry Inventory Network) with the Protected Areas Authority in Peru (SERNANP) to monitor the impact of climate change on the nation’s forests (see here). The first activity as part of this agreement will be training of SERNANP staff in methods of permanent…

This course was held on the 9th and 10th of September 2015, in the Bacaba Park, New Xavantina, Mato Grosso, in Brazil with the main objective to train future partners of The Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR) in the demarcation of permanent plots. The course was coordinated by Prof. Beatriz Schwantes Marimon and taught by team members of the Plant Ecology…

Amazon rain forests are the world’s most extensive and are extraordinarily diverse, being home to an estimated 16,000 tree species. Yet a new study has discovered that fewer than 200 species of these, barely 1%, are responsible for half of all tree growth and carbon stored in the Amazon. The study led by RAINFOR, also shows that the…

The latest data package released from ForestPlots.net makes available tree-by-tree diameter and floristic data from 91 samples of 0.1-ha each, in community and protected lands in eastern Madre de Dios, in Amazonian Peru.  Data were collected by a team of Peruvian botanists and assistants, in a collaboration between the University of Leeds, the Universidad Nacional San Antonio Abad…

Our analysis of 30 years of Amazon forest carbon dynamics, which was published last month in Nature, received widespread attention.  A big thank you to many RAINFOR colleagues for making this study possible. We discovered that the capacity of Amazonian forests to sequester carbon has weakened, with potentially important implications for climate change. Using on-the-ground measurements from…

Oliver Phillips was recently interviewed by the Columbian newspaper El Colombiano de Medellin about RAINFOR. The full article is available below.

The latest release of ForestPlots.net, available since yesterday, lets you review and update your contact details and institutional affiliations. If you have been involved in any RAINFOR field campaigns, it is important that you register as a user, and ensure that your user account is linked to your participant details. These details should be kept up to date;…

In 2014 the regular assessment of the quality of research at UK universities – the Research Assessment Exercise, or REF -evaluated for the first time the impact of research on policy and society.  In Leeds we wrote a case study that described the many ways in which the work of RAINFOR, AfriTRON and ForestPlots.net has…

As we describe in research published this month (Brienen et al. Nature 519, 344–348), the biomass dynamics of apparently intact forests of the Amazon have been changing for decades with important consequences. RAINFOR’s partners and other researchers have been taking a close-up look at Amazon forests since the 1980s, tracking the lives of hundreds of thousands of…

We have been working on improving the ForestPlots.net interface . We hope you like the new version. The instruction to re-activate your account are as follows: 1. On  the page https://secure.forestplots.net/forgotten-password click on the ” Forgotten Password” 2. Enter your email address and click the “Submit ” button 3. a message that will be sent the information to update your…

ForestPlots.net, the secure online database used to manage most of RAINFOR’s long-term data, is now able to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to datasets. DOIs provide a system for tracking where the data came from, citing it in publications and providing the data collectors with acknowledgment for their work. ForestPlots.net has been used as a case study for DataCite and…

Super-charged tropical trees: Borneo’s productive trees vitally important for global carbon cycling A team of scientists has found that the woody growth of forests in north Borneo is half as great again as in the most productive forests of north-west Amazonia, an average difference of 3.2 tons of wood per hectare per year. The new…