'Biomass recovery and carbon mitigation potential in regenerating Neotropical forests following agricultural land use', with Prof Robin L. Chazdon

Past Event

Date
22 February 2017, 5:15pm - 7:30pm

Location
OUCE
South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY

This event is organised by the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests, an Oxford Martin School programme

February 22 @ 4:15 pm - 6:30 pm

- Free

Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests seminar followed by drinks – all welcome – register online at Bookwhen

Speaker: Prof Robin L. Chazdon, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut

In this talk, Dr Chazdon will present an overview of biomass recovery during natural regeneration of tropical forests and implications for carbon sequestration at plot scales and large geographic scales. At the plot scale, changes in carbon stocks during succession are driven by demographic processes of tree growth, recruitment, and mortality. Geographically, these processes are mediated by annual rainfall and by differences in species composition and dominance. Across the lowland Neotropics, biomass recovery is strongly influenced by annual and seasonal rainfall. Predictive models of biomass recovery during succession across different climate zones are then used to estimate the potential for naturally regenerating forests to store carbon in aboveground biomass over the next 40 years. The results show that protecting and enhancing natural regeneration in the lowland Neotropics provides a cost-effective nature-based solution for carbon mitigation.

Robin Chazdon is professor emerita in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Connecticut, USA. Her long-term and on-going collaborative research focuses on successional pathways, forest dynamics, drivers of land-use change, and functional ecology of trees in Neotropical forests. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biotropica, as President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, and as a member-at-large of the governing board of the Ecological Society of America. She is a member of the Board of Directors of EcoLogic Development Fund. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation and Director of the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network PARTNERS (People and Reforestation in the Tropics), focused on understanding the social and ecological drivers of reforestation in the tropics. After 28 years as a university professor, Dr Chazdon is moving into the science-policy arena in forest landscape restoration. She has taken on new positions as a Research Professor with the Tropical Forests and People Centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast and as Senior Research Associate with the International Institute of Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She recently became a Senior Fellow with the World Resources Institute Global Restoration Initiative, where she is working to enhance decision support tools for landscape restoration and promote natural regeneration in restoration planning. She is an author of over 140 peer-reviewed scientific articles and co-editor of two books on tropical forests. Her sole-authored book “Second growth: The promise of tropical forest regeneration in an age of deforestation” was published in 2014.