WET-RISK: Basin-wide assessment of amazon wetland forests sensitivity to extreme climatic events and its ecological consequences

The Amazon rainforest, the most biodiverse ecosystem on Earth, plays a crucial role in global climate regulation. Within this vast landscape, large meandering rivers and seasonally flooded forests are iconic ecosystems, where people, plants, and animals are adapted to flooding seasonality and their survival depends on the regularity of this rhythmic pulse. However, climate change is altering these patterns, bringing more frequent extreme floods, droughts, and heatwaves. These changes threaten wetland tree species from both sides - demanding resistance to longer floods as well as extreme droughts. Understanding the physiological mechanisms driving tree responses to climatic extremes across different wetland forest types at large spatial scale is essential to predicting the future of Amazonian flooded forests, their biodiversity, and their role in carbon cycling.
Our knowledge of the physiology of these ecosystems is currently restricted to a handful local studies, therefore our research question is: How does the sensitivity to extreme drought and flooding across different types of Amazonian flooded forests modulate Amazon forest resilience and carbon cycling at basin-wide scale? My main aims are to:
Aim 1) Build the first large-scale dataset of tree physiological traits that determine water and thermal stress resistance across Amazonian wetland forests, spanning the full range of flooding and nutrient conditions.
Aim 2) Identify the ecophysiological mechanisms that allow trees to survive extreme hydrological and climatic stress, revealing how different wetland forests may cope with climate change.
Aim 3) Assess the consequences for biodiversity, forest demography, and carbon cycling, determining whether these forests are resilient to increasing environmental extremes or at risk of collapse.
To achieve this, we will integrate cutting-edge approaches, including tree physiology measurements, 3D laser scanning, and long-term forest monitoring across the Amazon basin....