{"id":43109,"date":"2024-05-20T12:24:03","date_gmt":"2024-05-20T15:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.raisg.org\/?p=43109"},"modified":"2024-05-21T12:26:20","modified_gmt":"2024-05-21T15:26:20","slug":"more-than-third-of-amazon-rainforest-struggling-to-recover-from-drought-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raisg.org\/es\/radar\/more-than-third-of-amazon-rainforest-struggling-to-recover-from-drought-study-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"More than third of Amazon rainforest struggling to recover from drought, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Critical slowing down\u2019 of recovery raises concern over forest\u2019s resilience to ecosystem collapse<\/p>\n

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THE GUARDIAN
\n20 de mayo, 2024<\/p>\n

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More than a third of the Amazon rainforest is struggling to recover from drought, according to a new\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0that warns of a \u201ccritical slowing down\u201d of this globally important ecosystem.<\/p>\n

The signs of weakening resilience raise concerns that the world\u2019s greatest tropical forest \u2013 and biggest terrestrial carbon sink \u2013 is degrading towards a point of no return.<\/p>\n

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It follows four supposedly \u201cone-in-a-century\u201d dry spells in less than 20 years, highlighting how a human-disrupted climate is putting unusually intense strains on trees and other plants, many of which are dying of dehydration.<\/p>\n

In the past, the canopy of the South American tropical forest, which covers an area equivalent to about half of Europe, would shrink and expand in tandem with the annual dry and rainy seasons. It also had the capacity to bounce back from a single drought.<\/p>\n

But in recent times, recoveries have become more sluggish because droughts are growing more intense in the south-east of the Amazon and more frequent in the north-west.<\/p>\n

The new paper, published in\u00a0Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>, examines satellite images of vegetation activity from 2001 to 2019. Tens of thousands of pixels, each covering a 25-sq km (9.65-sq mile) area, were analysed on a month-by-month basis and correlated with local rainfall data.<\/p>\n

The authors\u2019 goal was to investigate how \u201cthe frequency, intensity, or duration of droughts contributes to stability loss of Amazon vegetation\u201d.<\/p>\n

They found 37% of the mature vegetation in the region exhibited a slowing-down trend. While the patterns varied from area to area, they concluded that the highly deforested and degraded south-eastern Amazon was most vulnerable to a \u201ctipping event\u201d: in other words, a calamitous decline of the tropical rainforest to a different, drier state.<\/p>\n

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