Paulo Brando

What they work on

1. Extend a 21-year record of tree growth, mortality, biomass, canopy cover, soil moisture and forest–atmosphere carbon and water exchange at Tanguro, Brazil, to 27 years, to track recovery after repeated fire, drought and windthrow.
2. Test whether fire legacies such as trunk wounds make Amazon forests more vulnerable to later droughts and windstorms, and whether disturbance shifts forests toward fast-growing, short-lived trees that slow carbon recovery.
3. Measure tree water transport, stored energy reserves and deep rooting to test whether evapotranspiration, the water released by plants and soil, recovers as forests regrow but fails under more intense droughts.
4. Test whether forest edges face the highest collapse risk through grass invasion and repeated burning, and use field data to improve two ecosystem computer models that locate tipping thresholds.
5. Quantify how hot, dry forest edges next to farms change tree death and regeneration after drought and wildfire, using forest inventories and animal exclusion experiments.
6. Map Amazon forest vulnerability to climate change and fragmentation across the basin by combining tree trait and animal activity data from three regions with remote sensing and species distribution modeling.

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Why it matters

The Amazon's carbon stores and rainfall recycling help regulate climate regionally and globally, and parts of it could collapse by mid-century. Knowing when disturbed forests recover and when they tip into scrubland could guide land and fire management, including strategies to avoid catastrophic wildfires. It could also inform forest conservation and restoration and support governments, conservation groups and carbon markets in data-driven decisions. Openly shared long-term data will also serve as benchmarks for climate models and satellite carbon monitoring.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

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The school

Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.

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