Imagine the Amazon rainforest's 300 billion trees and ample water supply being dried out and reduced to a Savannah-like state.
Researchers are saying it could happen as soon as post-2050, thanks to climate change. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, researchers say that different parts of the Amazon rainforest will react differently and with varying intensity to climate change, turning the beautiful spread of land into nothing more than acres of green flatlands about 35-plus years from now.
If their prediction comes true, it can lead to the Amazonian ecosystem, which is dependent on its massive supply of trees, water and carbon, to be thrown completely off.
The working model that Harvard University ecologist Paul Moorcroft and his colleagues used with their study is called the "Ecosystem Demography Biosphere model," and it enables scientists to follow how trees react to climate change. Moorcroft's team used the model, observations and remote sensing to make their startling prediction.
Using this model, researchers were able to unearth that a traditional dry season lasting four months would have the Amazon rainforest losing in the neighborhood of 20 percent of its biomass if the season increases by only two months.
"As we have shown here, models that incorporate plant-level dynamics are able to characterize observed extant patterns of variation in the structure, composition, and dynamics of Amazonian ecosystems more accurately, and accounting for these patterns has important implications for the sensitivity and ecological resilience of Amazon forests to different levels of climatological perturbation," the authors report.
Scary, isn't it?
