Greenhouse gas measurement in Amazonian peatlands

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F86652079%3A_____%2F19%3A00518248" target="_blank" >RIV/86652079:_____/19:00518248 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

estonština

Original language name

Kasvuhoonegaaside mõõtmine Amasoonia soodes

Original language description

Peatlands are an enormous sink of carbon and nitrogen. Natural and human disturbances may release them as greenhouse gases or water pollutants. Tropical peatlands have especially intensive matter cycling. Amazonia holds almost a half of tropical peatlands. Most of it is inaccessible to current forestry and drainage machinery and thus untouched by man. Tropical rainforest has been labelled ’lungs of the Earth’. While photosynthesis in mature forests does sequester carbon in biomass, they respire an equal amount of carbon dioxide (CO2). Only swamp forests may sequester carbon in wet anoxic peat for centuries. However, anoxic decomposition of peat yields methane (CH4) and suboxic denitrification releases nitrous oxide (N2O), which have a high global warming potential per molecule. In undisturbed peatlands, carbon sequestration outweighs greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas budgets are more complicated in disturbed peatlands. With an objective to clarify the greenhouse gas budget of tropical peatlands, a measurement campaign was held in Iquitos, Peruvian Amazon in September 2019. We compared the greenhouse gas budgets, using opaque chambers, and measured their potential environmental factors in three sites under different disturbance histories: 1) a Mauritia flexuosa palm dominated natural swamp forest disturbed by annual floods, 2) slope swamp forest grown in 12 years on fallow pasture and banana plantation, and 3) slash-and-burn cassava field. The slope swamp respired the most CO2 while site differences were not large and may have been offset by photosynthesis. Wet swamp forest sites, especially palm trunks, emitted large quantities of CH4. Surprisingly the natural swamp forest floor emitted huge amounts of N2O which we could not link to any direct physical or chemical measure of disturbance. The top few centimeters of peat, where we lacked environmental measurements, might have produced the N2O.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10511 - Environmental sciences (social aspects to be 5.7)

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

100 Years of Estonian Geography: Selected Studies

ISBN

978-9949-03-242-6

Number of pages of the result

7

Pages from-to

323-329

Number of pages of the book

364

Publisher name

Publicationes Instituti Geographici Universitatis Tartuensis

Place of publication

Tartu

UT code for WoS chapter

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