EUSTACH: BACKGROUND

Despite widespread concern and increased international efforts at conservation, the world's tropical forests continue to disappear at an unprecedented rate. Of vital importance in developing sustainable management and exploitation systems for tropical forests are the questions as to how far human intervention affects the forests' basic capacities to renew themselves and how to safeguard the basic ecological processes such as biological productivity and nutrient and water cycling. Altered cycles of water, energy, carbon and nutrients, resulting from the changes in Amazonian vegetation cover, are expected to have climatic and environmental consequences at local, regional and global scales. To understand these consequences and to mitigate their negative effects, enhanced knowledge is needed of the functioning of both the existing natural forest systems as well as systems which have already been converted to various other forms of land use or secondary regrowth.

The role of Amazonia in the global atmospheric carbon balance

The impact of Amazonia to the global atmospheric budget of radiatively active trace gases and aerosols

The impact of Amazonia on the global atmospheric budget of reactive trace gases and the oxidising power of the atmosphere