Paulo M Brando

• PhD-Interdisciplinary Ecology
• Associate Professor at Yale University

Frequent and extensive fires, which do not occur naturally in Amazonia, are a neglected net source of anthropogenic emissions in national and global carbon budgets. More fires are expected in Amazonian humid forests with the increase of severe droughts combined with land cover change. However, it is challenging to integrate them into estimates of e...

Deforestation (the complete removal of an area’s forest cover) and forest degradation (the significant loss of forest structure, functions, and processes) are the result of the interaction between various direct drivers, often operating together. By 2018, the Amazon forest had lost approximately 870,000 km² of its original cover, mainly due to expa...

Amazon forests are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disturbances such as droughts, fires, windstorms, logging, and forest fragmentation, all of which lead to forest degradation. Nevertheless, quantifying the extent and severity of disturbances and their cumulative impact on forest degradation remains a significant challenge. In this study, we co...

Soil moisture is a crucial variable mediating soil‐vegetation‐atmosphere water exchange. As climate and land use change, the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and disturbances will likely alter feedbacks between ecosystem functions and soil moisture. In this study, we evaluated how extreme drought (2015/2016) and postfire...

The fire crises in the Amazon continues to increase the risk of large-scale forest dieback, threatening regional biodiversity and global climate. This issue gained international attention in 2019 when fires in the Brazilian Amazon led to a fire ban imposition. Despite the uncertainty of its impact, the fire ban was reenacted in subsequent years. He...

Forest disturbances associated with edge effects, wildfires, and windthrow events have impacted large swaths of the tropics. Defining the levels of forest disturbance that cause ecologically relevant reductions in fruit and seed (FS) production is key to understanding forest resilience to current and future global changes. Here, we tested the hypot...

Deforestation and climate change are expected to alter fire regimes along the Cerrado-Amazon transition, one of the world’s most active agricultural frontiers. Here we tested the hypothesis that the time since land-use transition (age of frontier) and agricultural intensification also drive changes in the region’s fire regimes by reducing fire prob...

Trees balance temporal asynchrony in carbon source and sink activity by accumulating and using non‐structural carbon (NSC). Previous work has demonstrated differences in the amount and distribution of NSC stored in stemwood in tropical tree species and related these patterns in NSC distribution to tree growth and mortality rates. However, we still...

Free read-only: https://rdcu.be/dkR4Z Several different drivers are contributing to climate change within the Amazon basin, including forcing from greenhouse gases and aerosols, plant physiology responses to rising CO2, and deforestation. Attribution among these drivers has not been quantified for Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) climate simulat...

Tropical ecosystems store over half of the world’s aboveground live carbon as biomass, and water availability plays a key role in its distribution. Although precipitation and temperature are shifting across the tropics, their effect on biomass and carbon storage remains uncertain. Here we use empirical relationships between climate and aboveground...

The Amazon biome is being pushed by unsustainable economic drivers towards an ecological tipping point where restoration to its previous state may no longer be possible. This degradation is the result of self-reinforcing interactions between deforestation, climate change and fire. We assess the economic, natural capital and ecosystem services impac...

Besides fire, windstorms are among the most common forest disturbances in tropical forests around the world. In combination with vegetation degradation caused by fire, the forests become more susceptible to disturbances from windstorms, and climate change is expected to enhance the occurrence of extreme precipitation and wind speeds that may lead t...

The Brazilian Cerrado is one of the most biodiverse savannas in the world, yet 46% of its original cover has been cleared to make way for crops and pastures. These extensive land-use transitions (LUTs) are expected to influence regional climate by reducing evapotranspiration (ET), increasing land surface temperature (LST), and ultimately reducing p...

Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical chan...

Fire is an integral component of ecosystems globally and a tool that humans have harnessed for millennia. Altered fire regimes are a fundamental cause and consequence of global change, impacting people and the biophysical systems on which they depend. As part of the newly emerging Anthropocene, marked by human-caused climate change and radical chan...

Exceptional fire activity in 2019 sparked concern about Amazon forest conservation. However, the inability to rapidly separate satellite fire detections by fire type hampered fire suppression and assessment of ecosystem and air quality impacts. Here, we describe the development of a near–real-time approach for tracking contributions from deforestat...

The Amazon forest has the highest biodiversity on Earth. However, information on Amazonian vertebrate diversity is still deficient and scattered across the published, peer‐reviewed, and gray literature and in unpublished raw data. Camera traps are an effective non‐invasive method of surveying vertebrates, applicable to different scales of time and...

The Amazon forest has the highest biodiversity on Earth. However, information on Amazonian vertebrate diversity is still deficient and scattered across the published, peer-reviewed, and gray literature and in unpublished raw data. Camera traps are an effective non-invasive method of surveying vertebrates, applicable to different scales of time and...

Biodiversity losses have increased in tropical forests due to fire‐related disturbances. As landscape fragmentation and climate change increase, fires will become more frequent and widespread across tropical rain forests worldwide, with important implications for forest dynamics by altering plant–animal interactions. Here we tested the hypothesis t...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

Tropical fire activity closely follows the co-occurrence of multiple climate stressors. Yet, it remains challenging to quantify how changes in climate alter the likelihood of fire risks associated with compound events. Recent abrupt changes in fire regimes in iconic landscapes in Brazil (namely the Pantanal and Xingu) provide a key opportunity to e...

Biophysical effects from deforestation have the potential to amplify carbon losses but are often neglected in carbon accounting systems. Here we use both Earth system model simulations and satellite–derived estimates of aboveground biomass to assess losses of vegetation carbon caused by the influence of tropical deforestation on regional climate ac...

The contemporary fire regime of southern Amazonian forests has been dominated by interactions among droughts and sources of fire ignition associated with deforestation and slash-and-burn agriculture. Until recently, wildfires were concentrated mostly on private properties, with protected areas functioning as large-scale firebreaks along the Amazon’...

LiDAR data are being increasingly used to provide a detailed characterization of the vertical profile of forests. This characterization enables the generation of new insights on the influence of environmental drivers and anthropogenic disturbances on forest structure as well as on how forest structure influences important ecosystem functions and se...

La degradación de los bosques amazónicos debe incorporarse a la agenda de la COP26 (traducción)

A degradação da floresta amazônica deve ser incorporada à agenda da COP26 (Tradução)

Science Panel for the Amazon, Chapter 23. In: Amazon Assessment Report 2021

Brazil’s leadership in soybean and maize production depends on predictable rainfall in the Amazon-Cerrado agricultural frontier. Here we assess whether agricultural expansion and intensification in the region are approaching a climatic limit to rainfed production. We show that yields decline in years with unusually low rainfall or high aridity duri...

This chapter discusses the main drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in the Amazon, particularly agricultural expansion, road construction, mining, oil and gas development, forest fires, edge effects, logging, and hunting. It also examines these activities’ impacts and synergies between them.

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

Non-technical summary We summarize some of the past year's most important findings within climate change-related research. New research has improved our understanding about the remaining options to achieve the Paris Agreement goals, through overcoming political barriers to carbon pricing, taking into account non-CO 2 factors, a well-designed implem...

Biodiversity contributes to the ecological and climatic stability of the Amazon Basin1,2, but is increasingly threatened by deforestation and fire3,4. Here we quantify these impacts over the past two decades using remote-sensing estimates of fire and deforestation and comprehensive range estimates of 11,514 plant species and 3,079 vertebrate specie...

Free-to-read at: https://rdcu.be/cw7ua; Portuguese and Spanish versions of this paper are provided at: https://github.com/celsohlsj/ngeo_correspondence

The Amazon biome, despite its resilience, is being pushed by unsustainable economic drivers towards an ecological tipping point where restoration to its previous state may no longer possible. This is the result of self-reinforcing interactions between deforestation, climate change and fire. In this paper, we develop scenarios that represent movemen...

Carbon losses from forest degradation and disturbances are significant and growing sources of emissions in the Brazilian Amazon. Between 2003 and 2019, degradation and disturbance accounted for 44% of forest carbon losses in the region, compared with 56% from deforestation (forest clearing). We found that land tenure played a decisive role in expla...

Understanding and predicting the effect of global change phenomena on biodiversity is challenging given that biodiversity data are highly multivariate, containing information from tens to hundreds of species in any given location and time. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model has been recently proposed to decompose biodiversity data into lat...

Fire is one of the most powerful modifiers of the Amazonian landscape and knowledge about its drivers is needed for planning control and suppression. A plethora of factors may play a role in the annual dynamics of fire frequency, spanning the biophysical, climatic, socioeconomic and institutional dimensions. To uncover the main forces currently at...

Non‐structural carbon (NSC) storage (i.e. starch, soluble sugras and lipids) in tree stems play important roles in metabolism and growth. Their spatial distribution in wood may explain species‐specific differences in carbon storage dynamics, growth and survival. However, quantitative information on the spatial distribution of starch and lipids in w...

Riparian forests play key roles in protecting biodiversity and water resources, making them priorities for conservation in human-dominated landscapes, but fragmentation associated with expanding tropical croplands threatens their ecological integrity. We compared the structure of tropical riparian forests within intact and cropland catchments in a...

Neste trabalho avaliamos a cobertura de vegetação nativa em três escalas diferentes: 21 terras indígenas (TIs) na sub-bacia do Rio Juruena em Mato Grosso, nas sub-bacia inteira e em todo estado de Mato Grosso. Avaliamos também vários serviços ambientais associados a estas mesmas áreas, incluindo albedo, evapotranspiração e temperatura da superfície...

Neste trabalho avaliamos os estoques atuais de carbono e sua dinâmica nos últimos anos no entorno e dentro de 21 terras indígenas da sub-bacia do rio Juruena, abrangidas pelo Projeto Berços das Águas III.O estudo concentrou-se principalmente na análise de sensoriamento remoto, utilizando três mapas de biomassa distintos para analisar em cada um das...

Oxisol soils with high P sorption capacity are widespread in Brazil, which is the world's second largest producer of soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.]. To counter low P availability within highly weathered soils, Brazilian soybean producers commonly fertilize with approximately twice as much P as is harvested in soybean. This has led to the accumula...

Selective logging, fragmentation, and understory fires directly degrade forest structure and composition. However, studies addressing the effects of forest degradation on carbon, water, and energy cycles are scarce. Here, we integrate field observations and high‐resolution remote sensing from airborne lidar to provide realistic initial conditions t...

Understorey wildfires harm tropical forests by affecting natural regeneration, but the trajectories of fire-disturbed forests after disturbance are poorly understood. To fill this gap, we conducted experimental burns in a transitional forest between the Amazon forests and the Brazilian Savanna (Cerrado) and investigated their effects on plant commu...

Herein we aimed to test four supervised classifiers to map forest scars caused by agricultural burning activities, and also evaluate time-quality ratio accuracy. In the last decade, while deforestation rates decreased, the number of thermal hotspots increased through Amazonia. Monitoring forest burnings is important to identify and map location and...

Tropical forest fires have become more common due to interactions between deforestation, land clearing, and drought. Forest recovery following fires may be limited by nitrogen. Biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) is the main pathway for new nitrogen (N) to enter most ecosystems, but BNF may be constrained by other nutrients, such as molybdenum and p...

The trajectory and recovery time of fire-disturbed forests depend on the capacity of seedlings and resprouts to get established over time. Here, we investigated the mechanisms associated with fire effects on post-fire regeneration in the context of a large-scale fire experiment located in southeastern Amazonia. Specifically, we tested the hypothesi...

Fire is a powerful ecological and evolutionary force that regulates organismal traits, population sizes, species interactions, community composition, carbon and nutrient cycling and ecosystem function. It also presents a rapidly growing societal challenge, due to both increasingly destructive wildfires and fire exclusion in fire‐dependent ecosystem...

The Amazon forest’s main protection against fire is its capacity to create a moist understory microclimate. Roads, deforestation, droughts, and climate change have made this natural firebreak less effective. The southern Amazon, in particular, has become more flammable and vulnerable to wildfires during recent droughts. The drought of 1997/98 first...

Seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs) account for one-third of the interannual variability of global net primary productive (NPP). Large-scale shifts in dry tropical forest structure may thus significantly affect global CO2 fluxes in ways that are not fully accounted for in current projections. This study quantifies how changing climate might res...

Droughts can exert a strong influence on the regional energy balance of the Amazon and Cerrado, as can the replacement of native vegetation by croplands. What remains unclear is how these two forcing factors interact and whether land cover changes fundamentally alter the sensitivity of the energy balance components to drought events. To fill this g...

Wildfires, exacerbated by extreme weather events and land use, threaten to change the Amazon from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source. Here, we develop and apply a coupled ecosystem-fire model to quantify how greenhouse gas–driven drying and warming would affect wildfires and associated CO 2 emissions in the southern Brazilian Amazon. Regional...

In southern Amazonia, more than half of all cropland is devoted to the production of two rainfed crops per year, an agricultural practice known as “double cropping” (DC). Climate change, including feedbacks between changes in land use and the local climate, is shortening the extent of the historical rainy season in southern Amazonia, increasing the...

Understory fires represent an accelerating threat to Amazonian tropical forests and can, during drought, affect larger areas than deforestation itself. These fires kill trees at rates varying from < 10 to c. 90% depending on fire intensity, forest disturbance history and tree functional traits. Here, we examine variation in bark thickness across th...

Although tropical forest fires are naturally rare, they have become more frequent and intense in response to recent changes in land use and climate. This shift in fire regime may drive widespread forest degradation in Amazonia, with important consequences not only for species richness but also for functional and phylogenetic diversity. Here, we tes...

Scientific Framework to Save the Amazon By Scientists of the Amazon Countries and Global Partners September 30, 2019 We, the scientists who study and monitor the Amazon rainforest, appeal to the reason and conscience of humankind. The Amazon, the largest rainforest in the world, is at great risk of destruction, and with it the well-being of our ge...

Drought, fire, and windstorms can interact to degrade tropical forests and the ecosystem services they provide, but how these forests recover after catastrophic disturbance events remains relatively unknown. Here, we analyze multi-year measurements of vegetation dynamics and function (fluxes of CO2 and H2 O) in forests recovering from 7 years of co...

Tropical woody plants store ∼230 petagrams of carbon (PgC) in their aboveground living biomass. This review suggests that these stocks are currently growing in primary forests at rates that have decreased in recent decades. Droughts are an important mechanism in reducing forest C uptake and stocks by decreasing photosynthesis, elevating tree mortal...

Plain Language Summary Tropical deforestation impacts the local energy and water exchange between land surface and atmosphere, typically resulting in regionally warmer and drier climates. General circulation models still disagree in reproducing these changes and little has been done to derive them from first principles. Here, we present an alternat...

The forests of southeastern Amazonia are highly threatened by disturbances such as fragmentation, understory fires, and extreme climatic events. Large‐bodied frugivores such as the lowland tapir ( Tapirus terrestris ) have the potential to offset this process, supporting natural forest regeneration by dispersing a variety of seeds over long distanc...

Widespread degradation of tropical forests is caused by a variety of disturbances that interact in ways that are not well understood. To explore potential synergies between edge effects, fire and windstorm damage as causes of Amazonian forest degradation, we quantified vegetation responses to a 30‐min, high‐intensity windstorm that in 2012, swept t...

Human-modified forests are an ever-increasing feature across the Amazon Basin, but little is known about how stem growth is influenced by extreme climatic events and the resulting wildfires. Here we assess for the first time the impacts of human-driven disturbance in combination with El Niño–mediated droughts and fires on tree growth and carbon acc...

Meteorological extreme events such as El Niño events are expected to affect tropical forest net primary production (NPP) and woody growth, but there has been no large-scale empirical validation of this expectation. We collected a large high-temporal resolution dataset (for 1-13 years depending upon location) of more than 172 000 stem growth measure...

Episodic multi-year droughts fundamentally alter the dynamics, functioning, and structure of Amazonian forests. However, the capacity of individual plant species to withstand intense drought regimes remains unclear. Here, we evaluated ecophysiological responses from a forest community where we sampled 83 woody plant species during 5 years of experi...

Tall trees are more resilient to drought than short trees, suggests a comparison of the sensitivity of photosynthesis to soil moisture in Amazon forests. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.

Fire at the dry southern margin of the Amazon rainforest could have major consequences for regional soil carbon (C) storage and ecosystem carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but relatively little information exists about impacts of fire on soil C cycling within this sensitive ecotone. We measured CO2 effluxes from different soil components (ground surf...

Tree mortality rates appear to be increasing in moist tropical forests (MTFs) with significant carbon cycle consequences. Here, we review the state of knowledge regarding MTF tree mortality, create a conceptual framework with testable hypotheses regarding the drivers, mechanisms and interactions that may underlie increasing MTF mortality rates, and...

Supporting Information S1

Over the past three decades, large tracts of tropical forests have been converted to crop and pasturelands across southern Amazonia, largely to meet the increasing worldwide demand for protein. As the world’s population continue to grow and consume more protein per capita, forest conversion to grow more crops could be a potential solution to meet s...

Climate and land use models predict tropical deforestation and conversion to cropland will produce a large flux of soil carbon (C) to the atmosphere from accelerated decomposition of soil organic matter (SOM). However, the C flux from the deep tropical soils on which most intensive crop agriculture is now expanding remains poorly constrained. To qu...

Amazon droughts directly increase forest flammability by increasing air dryness and reducing fuel moisture. These droughts also increase forest flammability indirectly by decreasing soil moisture, which triggers leaf shedding, branch losses, and tree mortality – all of which contribute to increased fuel loads. These direct and indirect effects can...

Large-scale commercial cropping of soybeans expanded in the tropical Amazon and Cerrado biomes of Brazil after 1990. More recently, cropping intensified from single-cropping of soybeans to double-cropping of soybeans with corn or cotton. Cropland expansion and intensification, and the accompanying use of mineral fertilizers, raise concerns about wh...