Hidden Tapestry of Chemical Variation in the Amazon Forest Canopy Revealed with New Image

First Posted: May 26, 2015 08:37 AM EDT
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When it comes to the Amazon, location matters. Scientists have found that there's a hidden tapestry of chemical variation across the lowland Peruvian Amazon, which is especially important to note when prediction forest response to climate change.

"Our findings tell us that lowland Amazon forests are far more geographically sorted than we once thought," said Greg Asner, one of the researchers, in a news release. "It is not simply a swath of green that occurs with everything strewn randomly. Place does matter, even if it all appears to be flat and green monotony at first glance."

The Amazon forest occupies more than five million square kilometers, stretching from the Atlantic coast to the foothills of the Andes. Thousands of tree and other plant species are found throughout this area, each synthesizing a complex portfolio of chemicals to accomplish a variety of functions from capturing sunlight to fighting off herbivores to attracting pollinators.

In order to better understand that variation of the forest, the researchers used data collected from the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO. The CAO has a high-fidelity imaging spectrometer and a laser scanner, which mapped four huge forested landscapes along two Amazonian river systems. With this data, they developed the first high-resolution maps of the forest's canopy chemistry.

"This is the first time that so many chemicals have been measured and mapped in any forest ecosystem on Earth," said Asner. "No one has done the mapping we have achieved here, which enabled a discovery that the lowland Amazon is anything but monotonous or similar everywhere."

The results reveal that the pattern of chemical properties in canopy trees changes along the paths of the two rivers as well as across the landscape's topography on a microscale, with very small changes in elevation making a difference to the plants living there.

"Looking at the lowland Amazon with this kind of detail, you can see back in time, from the way the topography was shaped millions of years ago, which still affects soils and mineral availability today, to the way that different species evolved to take advantage of this great variety of subtly changing conditions," said Asner. "And we can peer into the future and see how quickly human activity is changing the kaleidoscope of diversity that has been uniquely shaped over millions of years."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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