Abstract

The Congo Basin plays a pivotal role in the global carbon cycle. However, increasing human disturbance due to the huge population expansion is generating large uncertainties in the regional carbon balance. This uncertainty mainly stems from a lack of understanding of forest regrowth trajectories. The central research hypothesis of the STEREO- funded AFROCARDS project is that the recovery rates of carbon and functional diversity in regrowth forests are strongly affected by environment (climate and soil) and land-use history (past disturbances). However, we lack the fundamental understanding of the importance of those drivers to constrain current vegetation models. Building this understanding is only possible through integrating forest observations at multiple spatial and temporal scales (from leaf traits to satellite remote sensing), coordinated with the development of Land Surface Models specifically calibrated on those ecosystems.

Consortium

The consortium built for this STEREO project combines the unique expertise of multiple partners who have been working for decades on the Congo Basin. It will allow - for the first time - bridging the gap between empirical on-the-ground work, which is critical to understanding the underlying mechanisms, and satellite remote sensing, necessary to upscale and map the observed changes through a detailed proxy-sensing approach based on UAV (drone) monitoring. All those observations will feed Land Surface Models, which are the current gold-standard tool to project the fate of ecosystems in a changing world.

Partners

UGent (Verbeeck and Bauers and Meunier), UCL (Defourny) and ULiege (Bastin), ERAIFT (Michel Baudouin), Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (Sassan Saatchi)