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Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Each Forest Dynamics Plot can contain as many as 360,000 marked trees.
History
Research on tropical biology on Barro Colorado Island in the former Panama Canal Zone started in 1923, and the Smithsonian Institution became responsible in 1946 for what has now become one of the longest-running programmes devoted to tropical biology. For more than 25 years, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) has been doing research around the world on tropical forests, including how these forests respond to climate change. STRI's Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) coordinates research activities in tropical zones around the world.
Twenty large-scale – mostly 50 hectare (120 acre) – plots in Latin America, Africa and Asia provide forest sites where scientists can measure, map and identify the trees. This census process, repeated every five years, allows scientists to collect quantifiable data on how climate change is affecting the forests and to measure factors associated with climate change, such as changes in tree lifespan or changes in species composition in the forest. The CTFS global datasets provide information on carbon budgets, nutrient cycling, biodiversity, and water quality and quantity.
The global carbon budget is the balance of exchanges of carbon between different carbon reservoirs. Examining the carbon budget can provide important information about gains or losses in carbon in specific areas.
To read more about STRI and its research, click here.
STRI and the HSBC Climate Partnership
The HSBC Climate Partnership will enable CTFS to expand the research described above to an integrated system of Global Earth Observatories. More tropical plots will be added and temperate plots will be measured for the first time. This will provide a more complete picture of the effect that climate change is having on biodiversity around the world. The partnership will also allow the research to expand into industrial and economic concerns, including studies of the carbon budget of the world's forests, and analysis of the role of forests in regulating fresh water in the environment.
Overall, this five-year partnership should establish a global baseline picture of the ecosystem which will allow for accurate conclusions about the effect of global warming and climate change on the world's ecosystems.
Project Outlines
The three main goals of STRI's participation in the HSBC Climate Partnership are:
- Research on carbon pools: studying where the carbon is in the system and how it moves through the system, from the atmosphere, to plant biomass, to the soil.
- Investigate the water-storage services provided by tropical forests. This research will be focused in the Panama Canal Watershed to understand how land-use decisions impact the storage and release of water in the environment.
- Forest Dynamics Plots: create more forest plots in both temperate and tropical zones to study the role that forests play in global carbon levels and how global warming affects their well-being.
A system which can store or release carbon such as a forest or the atmosphere.
Key Objectives:
- To understand the role forests play in regulating carbon, water and biological diversity
- Investigate the water-storage services provided by tropical forests to help direct watershed management practices
- Quantitatively census and study the relationship between carbon and forests at 12 global sites
