Severe storms that swept across Amazonia in January 2005 destroyed around half a billion trees, a loss estimated to equal 23% of the mean annual carbon accumulation in the Amazon's forests.
Storms often topple trees in the region, and now Robinson Negrón-Juárez at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and his co-workers have quantified the effect. Using field and satellite data, they found that the storms killed up to half a million trees in the Manaus region of northwest Brazil. They used these figures to model basin-wide destruction.
The team warns that climate change could increase storm intensity and so forest mortality, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere and further warming the planet.
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Ecology: Tree death count. Nature 467, 8–9 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/467008f
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/467008f