Amazon giants are getting even bigger.
A new broad study has discovered that the largest trees in the tropical jungle are not only firm, they are thriving, growing, multiplying in number and continue to play an important role in mitigating the impacts of climate change.
There was an expansion of 3.3% in large trees per decade, the scientists found, after tracking the changes in 188 intact forest plots in the Amazon in the last 30 years.
Directed by almost 100 researchers from 60 universities in Brazil, the United Kingdom and in other places, the findings were published on Thursday in the magazine “Nature Plants”.
The authors attributed growth to the growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning gas, oil and coal.
The document was welcome as evidence of forest resilience against climate change, but scientists warned that these large trees remain vulnerable as droughts, rays and fires increase frequently, while deforestation continues to represent a serious threat.
It was understood that the big trees were expected to be vulnerable to climate change, “said Adriane Esquivelbert, one of the main authors of the study, told NBC News in a telephone interview on Saturday.” What we see here is that they actually seem to be showing great resistance. “
“We are not seeing signs of them dying,” Esquivel-Muelbert, who was co-author of the study while at Birmingham University of Great Britain, but since then he moved to the nearby University of Cambridge. “They are increasing in size and number too.”
The scientists emphasized that, although protecting intact forest areas was essential to stabilize the climate, the Amazon cannot compensate for the large amount of carbon dioxide produced worldwide by cars, factories and electrical plants, and remains under threat.
The tropical jungle is a carbon sink, which means that it stores more carbon than it produces. Pushing the tropical jungle beyond its limit could accelerate climate change and have terrible consequences for local communities, including indigenous groups that depend on it.
Esquivel-Muelbert emphasized that it was difficult to predict how the worsening of climate change would have an impact on the future, and doubted that the increase in CO2 benefited the forest, warning that it can make larger trees more expose themselves to other factors such as drought.
“We don’t know the long -term consequences,” he said.
Other factors, including deforestation, are still a colossal risk for Amazon’s health.
Faturing Trees is, in some way, “positive news,” said Rebecca Banbury Morgan, the main author of the study of the University of Bristol. But it also means that the forest is now “more vulnerable to losing those trees.”
“Although we have shown that trees in the intact forest are still increasing in size, any benefit of this in terms of the carbon sink can be denied quite easily through deforestation and the impacts of felling, so preserving these intact forests is really a priority,” he told NBC News.
Forest fires, deforestation and global warming could permanently destroy the water cycle that supports parts of the Amazon jungle if measures are not taken in the coming decades, according to a separate study published last year in nature.
The study suggested that 10% to 47% of the landscape run the risk of transition from the tropical jungle by 2050 if heating and deforestation rates are not dramatically stop.
The Brazil Congress approved a bill in 2023 to relax the environmental license to pave a road that crosses the heart of the Amazon, and near one of the last regions that still has large areas of Pristine forest
Losing a large part of the Amazon could turn a key carbon sink into a source of emissions, since Arden’s forest fires and plants and animals break down, they can no longer survive.
