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Contact Information
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Jeff Chambers
Tulane University
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
400 Lindy Boggs
New Orleans, LA 70118
Ph: 504-862-8291
Fax:: 504-862-8706
chambers@tulane.edu |
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In
the Central Amazon near the city of
Manaus there are about 100 hectares of permanent forest inventory plots
such as the ZF-2 transect plots (gray bars in image). In these
plots, all
trees
larger than 10 cm base diameter (DBH) are tagged,
measured, and
identified to species. During subsequent inventories,
recruitment, growth of
surviving
trees, and mortality are documented. Analyses of
these data allow
estimates of important forest characteristics such as growth and
mortality rates, and whether or not there is a change in forest
structure and dynamics over time. These plots also serve as
important focal
points for many other ecological and biodiversity studies.
Allometric models based on locally harvested trees allow estimates of
the biomass and carbon content of trees as a function of DBH (Chambers
et al. 2001c).
A
Master's degree student who works with our group at INPA recently
published her thesis project studying seasonal changes in month tree
growth rates using dendrometer bands (image right) installed on trees
in the ZF-2 transect plots (da Silva et
al. 2001). Follow this link for
a spreadsheet containing these allometric equations.
One limitation of these forest
inventory
plots is
measuring the full range of tree mortality events across the
landscape. Even large 50 hectare plots only sample a small
fraction
of disturbance events impacting the landscape. New remote sensing
methods
enable sampling across large disturbance gradients across the
landscape,
helping to ensure that the spatial dimension of the ecological
processes is appropriate
sampled (Chambers
et al. 2007). My lab is currently leading a number of
projects in the Amazon to better understand how mortality events such
as blowdowns at regional
scales influence for tree species community composition and landscape
carbon
balance.
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INPA
students locating new blowdown from
remote sensing derived GPS points
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