AMAZON OBSERVATORY

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https://www.science.org/content/article/peru-20-year-study-charted-amazon-forests-revealed-warming-changed

By BARBARA FRASER, Science. 

Excerpt: PILLCOPATA, PERU—Twenty years ago, a dozen Peruvian biology undergraduates armed with machetes and tape measures laboriously cleared a trail down the steep eastern flank of the Andes Mountains near this sleepy Amazonian town. They staked out eight study plots along a 15-kilometer-long transect that stretched from the grasslands found near the relatively cool, treeless top of a 4020-meter-high mountain known as Apu Kañajhuay down the fog-shrouded Kosñipata Valley to the warmer forests below, which are soaked by as much as 5 meters of rain a year. Along the transect lies some of the world’s richest biodiversity. Now, those 1-hectare plots in and near Manu National Park and Biosphere Reserve are the centerpiece of one of the longest running field studies of how an Amazon forest is responding to climate change. The effort, known as the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG), involves researchers from around the world. It has produced thousands of data points and scores of publications that have offered new insights into how warming and drying are reshuffling tropical ecosystems. ...many of the students who helped hack out the original study plots went on to earn doctorates and academic posts and are now helping train a new generation of Peruvian scientists. The initiative became a “cradle of biologists,” says William Farfán-Ríos, a Peruvian ecologist at Wake Forest University (WFU) who was one of those machete-wielding students.... 

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