The Amazon basin is one of the most influential regions in the global land carbon cycle, hosting a major fraction of the world’s forest carbon stocks while also representing a major source of land-use emissions due to deforestation and degradation.
RECCAP2-CS investigates both disturbed and intact Amazon forests. In deforested and degraded areas, the project expands fire carbon bookkeeping approaches and develops new datasets to better quantify emissions linked to fires, logging, and forest disturbance. In intact forests, satellite-based biomass observations are used to estimate annual carbon balance and attribute carbon losses to droughts, fires, and wind disturbances, while identifying environmental drivers of carbon gains. These analyses help clarify whether the Amazon remains a carbon sink or is transitioning toward a source.