This award will support a workshop organized by Michael Coe and Daniel Nepstad (Woods Hole Research Center), Britaldo Soares-Filho (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Marcos Costa (Federal University of Vicosa), and Yadvinder Mahli (University of Oxford). The two-day workshop will be held January 15 and 16, 2008, in Belem, Brazil, to bring together four international science teams to understand the interactions between climate, forests, and land use in the Amazon Basin. The goals of this workshop are to review the state of our knowledge of these interactions in the Amazon and to design a science plan that could narrow the gaps in this knowledge. The particular emphasis is on understanding what regions of the Amazon are most sensitive to feedbacks between deforestation, land management, and climate and how rapid and permanent forest loss in much of the Amazon Basin can be avoided. Growing attention is being paid to tropical forest greenhouse gas emissions within negotiations of the international climate treaty (UNFCCC). Participation of many of the project scientists in the UNFCCC process will transmit workshop findings directly into this process. Ten graduate students will participate in the workshop and will take an active role in making the model simulations, presenting and analyzing the results at the meeting, and designing the future research plans.
