The World's Largest Environmental Experiment

Roland Piquepaille writes "The Amazon in South America is more than a forest or an habitat. It's a climate regulator which has to absorb between 200 and 300 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions produced by the 8,000 square miles of destroyed forests every year. In 1998, the Brazilian community, helped by many international institutions, launched the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment (LBA). The LBA Experiment is made up of 120 projects, 61 of which are already complete. The status of these projects is currently being reviewed by 800 delegates from 170 Brazilian and foreign institutions at the III LBA Scientific Conference held in Brasilia between July 27 and 29. NASA says it plays a key role in the LBA experiment through the use of its satellites and its computer scientists. But Inter Press Service reports that the Mega-Amazon Research Project Holds Surprises -- Good and Bad: good because it provides opportunities for 400 researchers to work on postgraduate studies in the area, bad because it's still not known if the forests absorb enough carbon to compensate the emissions caused by deforestation, therefore contributing to global warming. Please read this overview for more details, references and a map of the LBA sites spanning the Amazon."

Comments

Re:Moo

[Bearpaw]

This makes me wonder. How can 800 delefgaters agree on anything?

Why would they all need to agree on anything? This being science, a rough consensus on tentative conclusions and furthur efforts needed would be the reasonable expectation.

Sure, their intentions may be right, but wouldn't a group of closer to five or may be ten people be better?

Five to ten people to review the status of 120 projects, conducted along a river that is over 6,000 km long and up to 10 km wide? (Of course, that's just the river itself. The relevant area is much bigger than that.) IANAEnvironmentalScientist, but I suspect that 800 reviewers is not too many.

Forests vs. tree farms

[Engineer-Poet]

I'm not sure you can draw a clean line between them. On the one extreme you have old-growth in places like Alaska, and on the other you have conifer or aspen pulpwood plantations. But how do you classify all the various national forests? Even a roadless area can be turned into clearcut, at least if certain interests have their way. Much of Maine is owned by private companies and managed for wood production, but it seems to have more of the characteristics of a forest.

People like to live among trees. How do you classify "urban forests"?

I wish it was easy, but it doesn't appear to be.