Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Yue Li
Life Sciences; Agriculture and Veterinary Sciences
Forest Degradation Impact on Plant Water Stress in Southeast Amazonia
Tropical forests in the Amazon are facing threats from anthropogenic climate change and land-use changes. As a result of these external disturbances, such as extreme drought and deforestation, forest degradation is particularly concerning, which has been proposed to trigger an Amazon tipping point. To date, very little knowledge has been gained to understand this critical mechanism through which forest degradation may redistribute ecosystem water resources by increasing the water use for invasive plant species, thereby reducing water availability and raising water stress for intact forest species. Such ecohydrological interactions between forest degradation and the regional climate system have substantial implications for rainfall and water resources, given the firm reliance of moisture recycling on land within the Amazon basin. This project will build the first field experiment for the principal investigator (PI) to investigate the impact of forest degradation on plant water stress. To achieve this, sap flow and soil moisture sensors will be installed to consecutively measure water transport within dominant tree species in a degraded forest and an adjacent control site in the southeastern Amazon. This project will enable a milestone accomplishment by adding valuable in-situ measurements to the PI's past work on the Amazon forest-rainfall interaction, utilizing Earth system models and remote sensing. The sap flow and soil moisture measurements will be integrated with the existing observation network and remote sensing data, combined with machine learning techniques to provide observational constraints that enable better predictions of our Earth system.
