TREMOR: Mechanisms and consequences of increasing TREe MORtality in Amazonian rainforests.

Start date: 1 October 2015
End date: 1 September 2019
Primary investigator: Prof David Galbraith
Co-investigators: Prof. Roel Brienen, Professor Oliver Phillips FRS

Mortality rates of trees in Amazonian rainforests have been increasing for at least 20 years. Yet, there have been no real attempts to understand the mechanistic basis of this result.

TREMOR will use a combination of forest inventory data analysis and process-based modelling to investigate several hypotheses that could explain the increases in mortality.

These hypotheses include:

(i) increasing wind disturbance

(ii) increasing drought frequency

(iii) increasing liana abundance

(iv) increased competition

(v) faster senescence.

Finally, we hope to scale-up the impacts of increasing tree mortality on Amazon-wide carbon storage by using a dynamic global vegetation model.