The Effects of Forest Cover Changes on Hydrologic Ecosystem Services Across the Southwestern Amazon
Abstract
The Southwestern Amazon is home to one of the Earth's remaining intact ecosystems. However, the integrity of this region is threatened by both global changes in climate and local to regional land-use and land-cover changes. While most Amazonia-land-cover research has focused on deforestation, in this paper, we evaluated the effects of both forest degradation and deforestation on three Ecosystem Service indicators pertaining to the hydrologic cycle -evapotranspiration (ET), land surface temperature (LST), and precipitation- across the Southwester Amazon during the 2003-2020 period. We calculated spatiotemporal statistics over different forest conditions as well as over buffers around disturbed areas and determined the influence of forest disturbance trends on ecosystem services indicator trends. Our preliminary results indicate that differences in ecosystem services relative to intact forest were more pronounced during the dry season months and that ET and LST rates were statistically-significantly different within a 1-km buffer from a disturbance. We also found that positive trends in LST and negative trends in ET and precipitation are better explained by forest disturbances as these trends become more pronounced. Our results provide evidence that the effects of both deforestation and degradation are statistically quantifiable even in this remote and still relatively well-preserved region, which emphasizes the importance of conserving the Southwestern Amazon to avoid a tipping point that threatens to convert the Amazon into a savannah-like ecosystem.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFMGC26C..07S