EGU25-14074, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-14074
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Net carbon exchange in the Amazon, Cerrado, and Caatinga: Challenges and Insights from the 2023/2024 Drought
Santiago Botía1 and the Amazon drought 2023 team*
Santiago Botía and the Amazon drought 2023 team
  • 1Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Biogeochemical Signals, Jena, Germany (sbotia@bgc-jena.mpg.de)
  • *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract

Tropical South America plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle. On one hand, the Amazon stores large stocks of carbon (150-200 PgC), representing 50% of the tropical rainforest biomass.  On the other hand, the semiarid biomes of the neighbouring Cerrado and the Caatinga contribute largely to the inter-annual variability of the global land carbon sink. Both biomes are experiencing large threats due to deforestation, forest degradation, agricultural expansion and climate variability. While these threats in the Amazon have been largely studied, vegetation loss and associated carbon emissions from the Cerrado and Caatinga biomes have been somewhat overlooked. As a result, the mean and long-term trend in net carbon exchange in both biomes remains largely unknown. In this talk, I will give an overview of recent estimates in net carbon exchange and their uncertainty range for the Amazon and the Cerrado and Caatinga biomes. I will particularly focus on the development of the 2023/2024 drought and the carbon cycle response in the region. For this we leverage multiple data streams, from bottom-up models and top-down inversion systems, to remotely-sensed vegetation dynamics and in-situ flux and atmospheric measurements. I finalize highlighting the spatial heterogeneity of carbon fluxes across the region and emphasize on the remaining challenges to reduce the uncertainty in carbon cycle estimates and the need for enhanced atmospheric monitoring networks to improve our understanding of biome-specific drivers of net carbon exchange.

Amazon drought 2023 team:

C. Q. Dias-Junior, S. Komiya, A. M. van der Woude, M. Terristi, R.J. de Kok, G. Koren, H. van Asperen, S. P. Jones, F.A.F. D’Oliveira, U. Weber, E. P. Marques-Filho, I.M. Cely, A. Araujo, J. V. Lavric, D. Walter, X. Li, J.P. Wigneron, B. D. Stocker, J. Gonçalves de Souza, M. O’Sullivan, S. Sitch, P. Ciais, F. Chevallier, W. Li, I. Luijkx, W. Peters, C. A. Quesada, S. Zaehle, S. Trumbore, and A. Bastos

How to cite: Botía, S. and the Amazon drought 2023 team: Net carbon exchange in the Amazon, Cerrado, and Caatinga: Challenges and Insights from the 2023/2024 Drought, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-14074, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-14074, 2025.