ATBC 2008 - Anhuf
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Symposium
Environmental history of tropical rainforests
Organizers : Dieter Anhuf (anhuf -at- uni-passau.de) and Marie-Pierre Ledru (marie-pierre.ledru -at- ird.fr )
Thirty percent of the world’s land area is covered by forest (40.000.000 km2). Five percent of these form the world’s tropical rainforest. The largest continuous block is found in the Amazon River Basin of South America with almost about 5,600,000 km2 (Harcourt and Sayler, 1996). African rainforests account for approximately 20% (Archard et al. 2002) and Indonesia alone for another 10% (Morel 2007) of the rainforest area. The remaining forests are scattered around the globe, but mostly in SE Asia. Despite these huge dimensions, the evolutionary history and paleogeography of these rainforest are still poorly understood, and especially the lack of data reporting to quaternary history still allows much speculation on forest development and landscape ecology.
This symposium has the central objective of exploring the consistency of the observational studies to be compared with numerical vegetation models. These questions should be answered with up-to-date knowledge of the past climate based on several time-resolution approaches, from the intraseasonal to the decadal time scales. Some of these approaches are based on the study of spatial and temporal variability of the organo-mineral sedimentation and its pollen content, elemental and isotopic analyses of tree rings applied as paleoenvironmental tracers, paleogenetic as well as, the study of impact of climate and CO2 variability on ecosystem biodiversity and functioning.
The overall objective to be fulfilled by this symposium is the exchange and dissemination of information useful to climatological, as well as the ecological community and to further advance our knowledge on the past climate and ecological conditions within the humid tropical forest areas. This proposal is based on the assumption that substantial scientific advancement would be reached by bringing together humid forest specialists who work on different environmental proxies, in order to reach a more coherent picture of the environmental history of the tropical rainforests.
Landscape at RaleighVallen (CSNR) forest from the Volzberg top