Stem Respiration Across a Forest Disturbance Gradient in the Amazon

Twenty 250x10 meter plots in the Brazilian Amazon provide stem respiration measurements across a gradient of forest disturbance types, including undisturbed, logged, logged-and-burned, and secondary forests. Data collection spanned from June 2015 to July 2018, capturing a significant El Niño-mediated drought event in December 2015 that triggered understory fires in eight plots. This dataset offers a direct comparison of carbon cycling processes in human-modified tropical forests under both typical and extreme climatic stress.

Use Cases

• Modeling carbon flux changes based on disturbance type (undisturbed vs. logged vs. burned).
• Assessing the impact of the 2015 El Niño drought and associated understory fires on forest respiration.
• Comparing carbon cycling processes in secondary forests against primary forests.
• Calibrating or validating ecosystem models for human-modified Amazonian landscapes.

Strengths

• Captures a multi-year time series (June 2015–July 2018) across distinct disturbance states.
• Includes data from a specific climatic extreme: the El Niño drought and resulting understory fires in 8 plots.
• Plots are systematically distributed across a defined gradient (undisturbed, logged, logged-and-burned, secondary).

Limitations

• Column names and specific measurement variables are not provided in the available metadata.
• The exact row count and file size are unknown, limiting assessment of data volume.
• License and author information are missing from most platform entries.

Provenance

Source

Environmental Information Data Centre

Collection Method

Field measurements collected from 20 fixed plots (250 x 10 m each).

Time Range

June 2015 to July 2018

Freshness

2026-04-02 08:42:27.594127

Geography

Eastern Amazonia, Brazilian Amazon