Project
Resilience of Amazonian floodplains
Bernardo Monteiro Flores studies the resilience to fire of flooded and non-flooded forests in the Brazilian Amazon, in relation to climate change.
Blackwater floodplains of the Amazon are characterized by an annual flood pulse that keeps the dense forest partly inundated for several months. These forests can be highly flammable during dry years and regenerate more slowly than upland forests. We are using a combination of approaches to test the hypothesis that floodplain forests are less resilient to fire than the upland forests of the Amazon and therefore vulnerable to a savanna transition despite high levels of precipitation.
PhD dissertation:
Flores B.M. 2016. Resilience of Amazonian Forests: the roles of fire, flooding and climate. Wageningen University.
Publications related to this PhD dissertation:
Flores, B.M., M. Holmgren. 2021. White-sand savannas expand at the core of the Amazonafter forest wildfires. Ecosystems 24 (7), 1624-1637
Flores, B.M., M. Holmgren. 2021. Why forest fails to recover after repeated wildfires in Amazonian floodplains? Experimental evidence on tree recruitment limitation. Journal of Ecology 109 (10), 3473-3486
Flores B.M., M. Holmgren, C. Xu, E.H. van Nes, C.C. Jakovac, R.C.G. Mesquita, M. Scheffer. 2017. Floodplains as an Achilles’ heel of Amazonian forest resilience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114: 4442–4446.
Flores B.M., R. Fagoaga-Sánchez, B. Nelson, M. Holmgren. 2016. Repeated fires may trap Amazonian blackwater floodplains in an open vegetation state. Journal of Applied Ecology 53: 1597-1603.