Hi GEM team,

Here is a nice introduction on the work we are carrying out on El Niño by Laura Cole, a journalist from Geographical magazine: http://geographical.co.uk/places/forests/item/2149-research-blog-the-tropics-and-el-nino

Laura will be following our work on El Niño for a few months. If you have stories from your fieldwork, or findings that you would like Laura to showcase, don't hesitate to contact me.

Abrazos,
Cécile

Hi GEM team,
Here is a message from Miles Silman and his team, who are getting ready for a big re-census in the Andes: "There is an assumption that I wanted to check on about the strapping-tape dendrometers. Has anyone ever checked for stretch? For example, putting one on a steel or concrete lamp post, etc.? If so, what did they find?"

Here is the very cool 3D T-lidar scan of the canopy walkway in Wytham Woods, produced by Kim Calders of NPL/UCL:
https://youtu.be/RS6q3HMEJK8?vq=hd1080

Message from Erika Berenguer:

Our paper on the cost-effectiveness of field assessments of carbon stocks in human-modified tropical forests has just come out in Plos One:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133139

This is a very novel approach and, as far as we know, the first of its kind.

Please disseminate it widely,
Erika

Here's a nice, very convenient and cheap method for getting a standardized index of decomposition across the GEM sites: http://www.decolab.org/tbi/

As a plus, it is already been performed at a wide range of contrasting sites worldwide.

Note they have almost NO sites in the tropics. A nice easy project for GEM??

GEM has a paper in Nature!! Led by Chris Doughty, we show how forests in the Amazon lowlands responded to the 2010 drought. This shows the power of the the GEM approach to providing mechanistic insights into how forests work. The paper can be downloaded here...
http://tinyurl.com/oznd7wy

Calling all GEM users:
I hope your year has started on a good note?
I would just like to let you know that the GEM website is likely to get a lot of hits in the next few weeks, as the first GEM Nature paper is coming out soon, with good press coverage (Congratulations, Doughty et al.!!!).
This is a good time to update your profiles, make sure you have a photo on your avatar, post latest pictures and comments: use the GEM website to promote yourself and your work! Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any trouble logging in. Login is at the top right of your screen. Bonne chance, Cécile

We have just published in Ecosystems a description of the carbon cycle of the core 1 ha intensive plot in Wytham Woods.This is work emerging from the DPhil thesis of Katie Fenn. The work shows that the plot takes up 22 tonnes of carbon every year through photosynthesis, but less than 10% of this ends up as wood growth. Much more productivity ends up in the leaf canopy and even in fine roots. This is one of the few full descriptions anywhere of carbon cycling in mixed-age temperate broadleaf woodland (most work is on either plantations or coniferous forests), and forms part of our Global Ecosystems Monitoring network GEM. We also show how well our bottom-up carbon cycle measures track the eddy covariance measurements of total canopy CO2 exchange, giving increased confidence in both.

Congratulations to Katie for persisting with this! It is a wonderful contribution to both our global studies, and to the multi-discplinary and multi-faceted studies at Wytham Woods.

I have blogged about the paper here
http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/blog/the-ecosystem-carbon-cycle-of-a-forest-plot-in-wytham-woods

and the paper can be accessed here:
http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/uploads/1/8/7/6/18767612/fenn_wytham_carbon_cycle_ecosystems_2015.pdf

Revised versions of the RAINFOR Field Code Sheets for Trees and Lianas are available to download from the RAINFOR website in EN, ES, PT and FR.

http://www.rainfor.org/en/manuals

Please can you start using these updated versions when travelling to the field for tree and liana re-measurements? Many thanks.

Kind regards,

Joana Ricardo
Project Administrator (Part-time: Wed - Fri - 9am-5pm)
RAINFOR, AMAZONICA and TFORCES Research Projects

We have started our new traits campaign at the GEM plots in Ghana:
http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/blog/kwaeemma-a-plant-traits-campaign-in-ghana
Here's to Kwaeemma!

Dear Gem teams, the Environmental Change Institute are experimenting with live broadcast (and downloadable videos) of some of the MSc lectures on the theme "Welcome to the Anthropocene". Lectures will start next week. We encourage you to listen in and ask questions by twitter, and particularly encourage participation from tropical countries.

The live streaming can be followed at:
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/anthropocene/index.html

The lectures will be about 90 minutes long followed by 30 minutes of questions. The two lectures that will be streamed are:

Anthropogenic influence upon the climate: past and future prospects, Professor Myles Allen, Tuesday 14 October 9am, This lecture will be live streamed and can be watched online.

The macroecology and environmental impacts of humanity, Professor Yadvinder Malhi, Thursday 16 October 2pm, This lecture will be live streamed and can be watched online .

To watch the lectures via streaming, please visit this webpage from one hour before transmission and links will be available.

Pose your questions and comments to our audience via #ecilive.

We have a new paper in Nature Communications, led by Fernando Espirito-Santo, that describes the full spectrum of natural disturbance regimes in the Amazon for the first time. How often does a sing large tree fall over, or a bunch of trees, compared to when a storm blow down knocks over a larger area of trees. Such questions are important if we are to understand what drives tree death in the tropical rainforest, and also affect how we interpret the apparent increase of biomass we see in the RAINFOR plot network. The paper combined analyses at multiple scales: Landsat satellite data over the whole region, airborne lidar data and intermediate scales, and fine-scale tree mortality data from forest plot networks. The end result is the first complete description of the disturbance regime at multiple scales in a tropical forest region (Figure 3). This is truly a thing of beauty.
In terms of carbon sinks, the analysis shows that large stochastic disturbances are too infrequent to have a significant influence on the carbon sink observed. The big disturbances appear too rare to cause most of the forest plots to be recovering from stochastic disturbances.

The paper can be accessed here.
http://tinyurl.com/q5p6g95

Congratulations to the GEM team (Chris, Yadvinder & Liana) who co-authored a paper in Nature this week (cover story):

"The paper answers a long-standing question about the net carbon balance of the Amazon forest. It uses aircraft flights throughout the year at four different locations to measure the change in carbon dioxide concentration if air as it passes over the Amazon Basin. The study shows that in wet years and wet seasons the Amazon is a net sink (i.e. absorbs carbon) from the atmosphere, but in dry years and dry seasons it is carbon neutral or a source of carbon. Our main contribution in Oxford was to provide insight from our RAINFOR-GEM intensive monitoring plots across Amazonia, which suggest that the loss of the carbon sink was caused by a reduction in photosynthesis." (Y. Malhi blog, Feb 2014)

Gatti L.V., M. Gloor, J. B. Miller, C. E. Doughty, Y. Malhi, L. G. Domingues, L. S. Basso, A. Martinewski, C. S. C. Correia, V. F. Borges, S. Freitas, R. Braz, L. O. Anderson, H. Rocha, J. Grace, O. L. Phillips & J. Lloyd Drought sensitivity of Amazonian carbon balance revealed by atmospheric measurements, Nature 506, 76–80. Supplementary Info

Download the paper from here: http://is.gd/WZmcSs

R support - exporting high res. plots

Hi Guys, I have just been hitting my head against a brink wall trying to figure out he best way to export ggplot2 graphs in 600 dpi .tiff format for publication. This may be useful for many of you. The code is

ppi = 600
tiff("FIG1.tiff", width=6*ppi, height=8*ppi, res=ppi)
grid.arrange(fig_a, fig_b, fig_c, ncol=1, nrow=3)
dev.off()

This is the post that helped me get there;
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9771619/how-to-increase-the-size-of-the-graph-while-maintaining-the-relative-scale-of-it/9771817#9771817

For all the R whizz kids out there, please respond to this comment if you have advice on how to do this.

Merci,
Cécile

Visit to the GEM plots in SAFE, Malaysia. See blog at:
http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/1/post/2014/01/field-visit-by-the-bali-consortium-to-sabah-malaysian-borneo.html?fb_action_ids=10203145526947882&fb_action_types=weeblyapp%3Ashare&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

TROPIMUNDO is the first International Master in Tropical Biodiversity and Ecosystems (2 years, 120 ECTS) that allows students to delve into the interlinked ecosystems under threat by spending an entire semester in the field : tropical rainforests and woodlands, wetlands, both terrestrial and coastal such as mangrove forests, seagrass beds and coral reefs.
The European Commission provides a certain number of full Erasmus Mundus scholarships for EU and non-EU students.
Applications for 2014-2015 are now opened and the deadline is the 10th of December 2013.
Please do not hesitate to forward the information to your colleagues, students or any other potentially interested person.
www.tropimundo.eu.

Amazing new hi-res study of forest cover change world wide, and amazing visualisation tool on Google.
I've posted the links and some comments on my blog page
http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/blog.html

The CHAMBASA field traits campaign is finished
http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/1/post/2013/11/chambasa-field-campaign-is-finished.html

This is the the first (and largest) of the GEM-TRAITS campaigns across the tropics over the next few years. We have learnt a lot. Roll on Brazil, Ghana, Malaysia, Gabon and more...

A couple of new papers by our former DPhil students Royd and Khoon, Congratulations to both!

(downloadable from http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/blog.html)

Net Primary Productivity in a lowland dipterocarp forest in Borneo

We have a new paper our in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Biogeosciences, on the net primary productivity of an old growth dipterocarp forest at Lambir, Sarawak, Borneo. This emerges from the DPhil thesis of our former student Kho Lip Khoon. Up until now all our published studies on productivity have been from Amazonia. This is the first of a wave of results that will be emerging from our current work in Asia and Africa. More papers will also been emerging from Khoon's work in Lambir. Overall this work shows that productivity is higher on the clay soils of Lambir, but lower on the sandy soils, and on the clay soils is higher than observed in Amazonia.

Kho, L. K., Y. Malhi, and S. K. S. Tan (2013), Annual budget and seasonal variation of aboveground and belowground net primary productivity in a lowland dipterocarp forest in Borneo, J. Geophys. Res. Biogeosci., 118, 1282–1296, doi:10.1002/jgrg.20109

Xylem cavitation vulnerability influences tree species’ habitat preferences in miombo woodlands

We have a new paper in Oecologia from our Zambian former DPhil student Royd Vinya, emerging from his DPhil work on plant hydraulic traits in wetter and drier environments in the miombo woodlands of Zambia. The paper shows that tree species with a a narrow (wetter) habitat range were more vulnerable to hydraulic cavitation range than those adapted to drier sites, which had broader ranges. We observed a strong trade-off between vessel conductivity and resistance to cavitation, suggesting that tree hydraulic architecture is one of the decisive factors setting ecological boundaries for principal miombo species. While vessel diameters correlated weakly cavitation vulnerability, it was vessel length that was positively and most significantly correlated. This paper gives us insights into the role and flexibility of plant hydraulic architecture in determining species' ecological ranges.

Vinya R., Malhi Y., Fisher J.B., Brown N., Brodribb T.J., Aragao L.E. (2013) Xylem cavitation vulnerability influences tree species’ habitat preferences in miombo woodlands Oecologia 173:711–720 DOI 10.1007/s00442-013-2671-2. Supplementary Table.
Picture

As part of our leaf traits collections at key GEM plots, we are collecting information on leaf venation and architecture. Here are some beautiful images from our first plot. Wayquecha in the Peruvian Andes.
http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/1/post/2013/10/vein-structure-in-tropical-leaves.html
Many more sites in South America, Africa and Asia and Wytham to come in the next few years.

We are advertising a position for a four-year postdoc to work on carbon plots and plant traits in the Amazon and Atlantic forests, as part of the new NERC project ECOFOR. The post would be 50% Oxford, 50% Lancaster. It would be based in Lancaster for the first two years, with extensive periods in Brazil getting the field operation going, and then would be based in Oxford for the second half with a focus on data analysis, databasing and writing up.
Job details at:
https://hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=A813
Closing date Wed 13th November 2013.
Feel free to contact me for any informal enquiries

Message from Terhi (Borneo):

Hope things are going well. I am quite enjoying being back in Borneo. One of the main tasks this trip is finally to start taking hemispherical photos. However, as I have never done it before, I would appreciate some advice from more experienced people.

Firstly, I am not quite sure how to set up the photo points in my very shrubby logged plots. The Rainfor-GEM manual states that “At each subplot, locate an area close to the centre that is free of vines or branches at least 2 m above the camera lens (which should always be 1 m from the ground)” (page 72), but this is proving quite challenging in the logged plots. What do you think, is it more important to have the photos taken in representative spots, which match what the litter traps are collecting, or is it more important to enforce this 2 metre rule? We can find spots that don’t have anything directly above the camera lens, but I am not sure how large a buffer area is needed around the lens.

Secondly, how bright should the photos be for analysis? If I don’t adjust the brightness, they look fairy dark, but the contrast between vegetation and sky is good. I am taking three photos at each point, each at slightly different brightness, the medium setting being 0, but even the brightest setting I am using at the moment is quite dark. This is easy to change, but I’m not sure what kind of images work best in the analysis stage.

Any other tips also very welcome, if you can think of something I should know.

Thanks,
Terhi

I am on my way back from Hawaii, where we have been exploring getting some new GEM plots going with Chris Giardina and Greg Asner. I am very confident these plots will be up and running soon. A blog posting and pictures can be seen at:
http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/1/post/2013/10/the-forests-of-hawaii.html

Reminder to update GEM coordinates.
Deadline: 10th October.

Could everyone with plots in GEM please check that all plot coordinates are accurate? We are using this data in the GEM database and need the latest values.

How to change a plot coordinate:
Go to Welcome / Post Something / Sites / Plots / Edit. Coordinates are on the right hand side. If you have problems, please mail me.

All the best,
Cécile

Why not join a free online R course this month?

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/09/courseras-free-r-courses-are-running-again-soon.html