Friday, August 16, 2019: 9:20 AM
M103, Kentucky International Convention Center
Robinson Negron-Juarez, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Background/Question/Methods and Results/Conclusions
The lack of mechanistic explanation of the tree mortality across the Amazon has limited our understanding of drivers of ecosystem functioning in these forests. Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCS) are responsible for heavy rainfall in the Amazon Associated with this rainfall are strong descending winds that when reach the surface promote uproot or break of trees, the most dominant mode of tree mortality in the Amazon. We show that heavy rainfall explains a large fraction of observed tree mortality across the Amazon. This insight was include in the OLAM – ED2 model to study the impact of this mode of mortality in the patterns of biomass and productivity in the Amazon.