< Back to previous page

Project

Putting the C in Congo: enhancing resolution in the Carbon budget of the second largest tropical forest.

Tropical forests play a crucial role in the global carbon (C) cycle, and the African continent holds the second largest continuous block of tropical forest worldwide. Through a persistent research bias, our current understanding of ecosystem-atmosphere C exchange is mainly based on the Neotropics, while the Congo basin remains a blind spot. However, recent efforts have uncovered that these forests stand out by their ecological, climatological and biogeochemical differences with their Neotropical counterpart. Especially the much drier, bimodal rainfall distribution raises questions on the seasonal C dynamics in these forests. As such, this proposal aims to deliver an in-depth characterization of the annual and seasonal C exchange of a central African forest, using combination of new eddy covariance infrastructure and intensive C monitoring at a research site in the heart of the Congo basin. Moreover, the proposal wants to uncover the ecological basis for seasonal changes in C exchange, by valorising an extensive, historic species-specific phenology dataset. This dataset will help us to tackle the question: can we predict present-day gross primary productivity from species-specific drought avoidance strategies? Finally, the mechanistic -biogeochemical - understanding, along with the underlying ecological knowledge, will be used to look beyond the research site-level, and assess the basin-wide seasonality in C exchange in the Congo basin.
Date:1 Oct 2022 →  Today
Keywords:PHENOLOGY
Disciplines:Biogeochemistry, Terrestrial ecology, Plant ecology, Carbon sequestration science
Project type:Collaboration project